


Long way forward

by queerly_it_is



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Explicit Sexual Content, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Pining, post-Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-16
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-08-09 01:34:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 34,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7781743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queerly_it_is/pseuds/queerly_it_is
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they drop out of the hurtling nightmare of the wormhole, everything blends into nausea and the scream of alarms, the stars smearing into concentric loops outside their Lions.</p>
<p>Keith grits his teeth, hauling helplessly at controls that were already damaged even before they got thrown out of the hangar, across the universe and back into space again. Arms and shoulders straining, muttering constantly under his breath, he tries to get any real response from his Lion, but the connection’s been reduced to just a faint wavering spark, like a candle about to go out.</p>
<p>Finally Shiro brings his own Lion around and physically stops Keith’s uncontrolled spin. His voice sputters in over the com. <em>“This is no good. We’re gonna have to find someplace to set down.”</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this was one of those 'it'll totally be a short fic' experiences that got way out of hand. Endless thanks to everyone who kept me going as this thing consistently refused to end, I would've collapsed under it if not for you guys <3
> 
> There is now stunning fanart by [tattedmariposa](http://tattedmariposa.tumblr.com) which you should definitely go and look at [here](http://tattedmariposa.tumblr.com/post/152360363110/i-know-what-you-are-what-shiro-asks-like)

When they drop out of the hurtling nightmare of the wormhole, everything blends into nausea and the scream of alarms, the stars smearing into concentric loops outside their Lions.

Keith grits his teeth, hauling helplessly at controls that were already damaged even before they got thrown out of the hangar, across the universe and back into space again. Arms and shoulders straining, muttering constantly under his breath, he tries to get any real response from his Lion, but the connection’s been reduced to just a faint wavering spark, like a candle about to go out.

Finally Shiro brings his own Lion around and physically stops Keith’s uncontrolled spin. His voice sputters in over the com. “ _This is no good. We’re gonna have to find someplace to set down.”_

Keith swallows bile, shaking his head against the dizziness. Hands moving by memory, he shuts off the systems that aren’t responding, to kill the alarms if nothing else. It leaves almost none of the cockpit functional, everything lit a dim, scorched-looking red. The air reeks of smoke, and Keith can’t tell if the metallic taste is something in the cockpit that’s overloaded or if he’s bitten into his cheek.

“Shiro,” he coughs, “my Lion’s not answering. Can you find the others? Or the Castle?”

“ _No_ ,” Shiro says after a few drawn-out seconds, and Keith can just picture him considering whether or not to admit how bad it really is. “ _But we can worry about that later. Right now we’ve gotta fix your Lion and figure out where we are._ ”

Keith sighs, reluctantly slumping back in the seat. “All right, but you’ll have to do all the flying.” He still can’t bring himself to let go of the controls, dead as they are.

“ _Don’t worry, I’ve got you_ ,” Shiro tells him. There’s a new thud against the hull, a low rattle passing through Keith’s Lion as Shiro starts to point them in the direction of some kind of safety.

“Shiro,” Keith says, checking console after console one-handed, still holding one of the flight sticks with the other, getting nothing from them both, “if we can’t find them—”

“ _We’ll find them_ ,” Shiro says. “ _We will, Keith._ ”

Given their situation, it probably shouldn’t be convincing, but it is.

Left to be a dead weight, getting pushed through space by the Black Lion, Keith tries to drive away the little pang of selfish gladness that they at least ended up in the same place, wherever the place actually is. That even if they don’t know what happened to the others, he’s not on his own again. That out of all of them, it’s Shiro who’s here with him. When did he get bad at being alone?

-|-

Their safe harbour turns out to be a tiny planet in a mostly empty system, all sun-baked dirt and thin air, one side permanently facing its star like a flower that doesn’t know it’s dead. Shiro sets them down in the narrow band between the arid day side and the frozen-over night side, lands so carefully Keith barely feels it, then gets to work prying opening the Red Lion’s hatch so Keith can get out of the cockpit.

Outside, with his first good look at the damage Zarkon did, Keith winces and reaches out to put a hand on the side of his Lion’s jaw. He’s still trying to draw up the bond he can only barely feel, but it’s like sand between his fingers. Even with his eyes closed tight and concentrating with everything he has, there’s still more of a nonspecific thrum from the Black Lion than his own right now. One more absence tossed on the pile.

“We’ll fix it,” Shiro says, stopping next to him. It’s easy to say, and it doesn’t do anything for the gaping, lightless corner of his head where Red should be, but it’s still better than the lecture about recklessness versus patience Keith was expecting. Shiro’s voice reaches him sounding tired and frayed in the always-shifting wind, and the strange light here colours him in with sullen orange and muted greyness, throws long wild shadows behind him. The Black Lion looms like a protective mountain, its bulk blocking out the harshest spiky rays from the sun that’s stuck just at the horizon, holding off the painfully edged grains of sandy earth scraped up into the air.

Keith spots the way Shiro’s holding his hand up against his side, then the pinch around his mouth, the thin trace of sweat on his face. He takes an automatic step closer, then another one, slower but on purpose. “Are you hurt?”

“It’s nothing,” Shiro says, standing straighter, visibly trying to breathe more evenly.

“Sure,” Keith nods, watching Shiro’s face turn paler as he works at burying the grimace. He takes Shiro’s wrist and pulls his hand out of the way. Shiro rolls his eyes and starts to say something, but Keith’s already hissing at the seared, spitefully red wound that’s gone right through Shiro’s armour and the dense weave of the fabric underneath.

He glares up into Shiro’s borderline guilty expression. “Why didn’t you say anything? You’ve been flying for hours like this.” It launches out of him, too sharp, drives into the ground between them like a javelin. He realises he’s still squeezing Shiro’s wrist, the same urgent-powerless grip he had on his Lion’s controls, and it’s just as hard to unbolt his fingers.

“Hey, I’ll be fine,” Shiro tells him. He sounds concerned for Keith now, which just makes Keith feel more like he’s swallowed something molten, temper being pushed up from deep in his chest with nowhere to go.

“We’re dealing with this first,” Keith tells him flatly, turning and starting up the ramp into his Lion, trying to remember where Pidge told him the medical kits are.

_You need to keep at least two in your Lion, Keith._

_I prefer to just not get hit, thanks._

Shiro stops him by the upper arm before he gets more than three or four steps. “Keith, no. Our first job is making sure your Lion can fly. We don’t know if the Galra tracked us coming out of the wormhole. If they show up in this system looking for us—”

“Then you need to be able to fly _and_ fight,” Keith snaps, jerking loose of Shiro’s hold, frowning harder when Shiro’s mouth pinches off even more and he makes an automatic move to brace his side again. Keith notices the way his suit’s trying to cool him down, reacting to the delayed thought that he suddenly feels hot all over. “At least one of us has to be at full strength, Shiro.”

Shiro stares him down, their eyes level with Keith standing higher up the ramp. “I can fly just fine. But I can’t fight and carry your Lion at the same time.”

Keith’s jaw clenches, hands hanging down, strangling themselves. His steps ring off the metal as he walks right back into Shiro’s space. Dust sneaks under his helmet’s visor, clawing into his eyes. “And what chance d’you think we have if your reactions are shot because you’re injured?” He presses his arms tighter to his sides, keeping him from physically shaking Shiro. “What am I supposed to do out here if something happens to you, huh? What am I supposed to do?”

He means to yell – he _wants_ to yell, but his voice plummets into the same kind of gutted whispering that the planet’s using, gets snatched up and carried off by the wind. He’s standing too close to that open, worried look in Shiro’s eyes, the crease between his eyebrows, the predictable _I need to make this better_ set of his shoulders. _Idiot_ , he thinks, too desperate. If he was bleeding to death Shiro’d probably apologise for letting it get everywhere.

“Keith, it’s okay,” Shiro says, way too gently, reaching for him again.

Keith steps back, turns and stalks quickly up the ramp, through the hatch, itching between his shoulders the whole way. He doesn’t come back down until after he’s hunted through the storage units and found the medical kit, standing next to the compartment for a minute with the little box in his hands, breathing in and out. Waiting for his pulse to stop feeling like it’s puncturing him.

There’s a note in Pidge’s quick, slantwise handwriting stuck to the lid: _Just in case you can’t help it._ There’s a smiley face doodled underneath, and for whatever reason it makes Keith’s throat want to close up.

Maybe it’s the pain he’s in, or maybe it’s the look on Keith’s face, but Shiro doesn’t protest this time. He sits when Keith tells him, moves when Keith prods him, dry swallows alien pills Coran swears are safe for humans when Keith slaps them into his palm. And he doesn’t call Keith on avoiding his gaze as Keith checks the wound, spends too much time cleaning it, applying some bluish gel salve stuff he doesn’t understand but that’s meant to aid healing.

Gloves tugged off, Keith’s fingers work the creases out of the bandage he lays over the parallel gashes, feeling Shiro’s ribs flinch inward. It’s nowhere near as good as one of the Castle’s cryro-replenishers would’ve been, but it’s the best he can do. Keith spent enough time living on his own to work out how to patch most things that aren’t serious – and a few serious things he preferred to patch up than go to a hospital for – but seeing his crude, imperfect handiwork applied to Shiro still makes his gut twist up. There’s something like an apology in the back of his mouth, but it’s lodged there sideways.

“You’ll probably have a scar,” Keith admits eventually, dropping his hand, getting to his feet and looking Shiro in the face once he can’t put it off any longer. He offers Shiro a hand and helps him up. “But you’ll be okay. And you’re still an idiot.”

Shiro huffs distractedly, giving mental orders to his suit, watching as it reworks itself over the breach. They divide the rest of the medical kit into the pouches on their belts. Just in case. Above them, the sky is snow-filled clouds and cold stars where it’s not a blur of dust and fire. Standing in the constant twilight, drowning in the Black Lion’s shadow, Shiro could be anyone, or just a less unmistakable someone. Blink, and he’s a plastic soldier or an idea cut out from a dream, reassuringly vague and camouflaged. Blink again and he’s pale like bones left above ground, dangerous and unburied.

Glancing at the held-up, blistering day side, Keith thinks he remembers reading once that a sinking sun is the sign of a falling hero, remembers he didn’t believe in heroes anyway. It was a long time ago. When he swallows, everything still tastes like metal, and the insistent wind’s gluing dead earth to his lips. Shiro still has Keith’s hand in his.

“I can live with that,” Shiro says finally. “Don’t worry, I’ve had worse. Thanks.”

Keith shakes his head, slips his fingers loose from Shiro’s to rub at his mouth, already walking back to his Lion. “Forget it,” he says, not turning around. “Now you’d just better hope that between the two of us we’re even a fraction as good at repairing Altean tech as Pidge.”

Shiro’s quiet laugh follows Keith up the ramp, just a little ahead of his footfalls. Their shadows mind each other, equal as chair legs as they rock side by side. “Hey, we’ve gotten this far,” he calls, over the noise of the wind digging at the sky. “I like our chances.”

-|-

Surprising neither of them, but still irritating them both, they aren’t nearly as competent as Pidge.

It takes most of a day, or what passes for one on this planet, to get the basic power-up sequence to run all the way through without something else glitching out and showering them in sparks. The Black Lion tries to help when Shiro relays questions to it, eyes shut and a line drawn between his eyebrows, but there’s only so much they can get from an exchange that’s mostly half-shaped instinct and idea, with much less in the way of blueprints or manuals.

After the sixth or seventh attempt leaves Shiro basically nonverbal, tensed up enough that he warps a length of conduit with his prosthetic by mistake, Keith stops asking him to try. He doesn’t think the failure is the only thing about it that’s eating at Shiro, but he doesn’t know if he could get away with asking, even if he knew how to.

“Come _on_ ,” Keith spits, slapping his hand down hard on a panel. His eyes feel gritty and his stomach is an aching hollow, but all he can focus on is the chilled blankness where his Lion usually burns, bright and steady as a signal tower, daring him on.

“I don’t think that’ll help,” Shiro mumbles from somewhere over Keith’s left shoulder, the words flattened together by the silvery tool between his teeth.

“I had this working a minute ago,” Keith grates from his throat. Forcing a breath out of his nose and his shoulders to relax, he presses both hands flat on the nearest surface in the cockpit. “We’re trying, okay? Just work with us a little. I promise I’ll start listening better.” Ignoring the bristling feeling of Shiro watching him, Keith tries to reboot the sensors again. The hologram display wavers, insubstantial, and then judders brightly to life, and Keith falls back in the seat with a sigh, patting the console again, not caring this time if Shiro sees. “ _Thank_ you.”

“Okay,” Shiro says on a long exhale, dropping the tool into his hand and setting it down. “We’ve got almost everything running except for the plasma cannon and that last reserve of power for the engines.”

“That’s not ‘almost everything’,” Keith mutters. “Not if we’re gonna find the others, and definitely not if the Galra show up.”

“But it’s a good start,” Shiro says, leaning over to put his hand on Keith’s shoulder, keeping it there until Keith turns back to look at him. Shiro’s palm sends warmth sloshing all up the side of Keith’s neck, and his eyes are that will-dissolving kind of earnest. “Let’s take a break.”

Tipping himself forwards again, Keith digs his fingers into the corners of his eyes until all he can see is dark, overrun with grey static. It still seems like too much of him’s shuffling and turning towards Shiro’s hand where it’s fallen almost to the middle of his back, like there’s a spring coiled there Shiro knows how to wind.

“We can’t afford to take breaks right now,” he says, fingers scratching through his hair.

“A short break,” Shiro says like Keith never answered. He starts stacking all the tools together before walking out of the cockpit, leaving the hatch open behind him and the air hovering around the space he left.

Keith stubbornly reruns a diagnostic, then sits hunched over the glowing readout, trying to make his vision focus on the numbers. “C’mon, Red. Talk to me,” he says quietly, but there’s no change. He raps his knuckles on the side of his chair and groaningly forces his way upright.

He stumbles out, stretching as his spine realigns with a chain of pops and the muscles in his shoulders unlock, leaning on the nearest wall until the tingling leaves his legs.

Shiro’s waiting for him, a half-eaten ration bar in one hand and an unopened one in the other that he hands over when Keith walks over to him. The bars are mostly just food goo made more solid and slightly better-tasting using a process Hunk came up with, but it’s better than nothing.

“We’ll get back out there,” Shiro says, watching with a wry look as Keith chews down the ration bar in two oversized bites. “We just need to keep our heads and—”

“Be patient?” Keith says, mouth still full. He waves Shiro off when he offers Keith the rest of his own bar. He swallows too soon and winces. “You’re injured, remember? You eat it.”

Shiro’s eyes swivel to the ceiling for a second, but he doesn’t bother denying it. Keith cranes his neck from side to side, pulls his arms back behind him and shakes out his hands. He swallows water from a plastic bottle Shiro passes him, hands it back empty. “Okay, short break over? Can we go back to fixing my Lion so we can get _out_ of here now?”

“Did you hear anything I just said?” Shiro asks, eyebrows sliding up.

“I heard you,” Keith says, the muscles in his jaw tightening, blood in his ears drumming out the rhythm of flying nowhere, being stuck, doing nothing. “But we don’t always have time to be patient.”

Shiro sighs. “Keith, believe me, when you’re stuck somewhere and you’re trying to get home, patience can be the only thing that keeps you sane.”

“Fine,” Keith says, too shortly to sound as offhand as he wants. “You be can patient, and I’ll be working. We’ll double our odds.” He returns Shiro’s flat look. “What if the others are in trouble? We have no idea what happened to them.”

Shiro crosses his arms, shoulders squaring off, looking like objects in space would have to adjust their orbits to get around him. “They’re smart, and they have their Lions, and Allura and Coran will be looking for all of us. They might even still be together.” Keith can practically see him ticking the points off on his fingers. “We’ll just have to trust them to take care of each other and focus on not making things worse for ourselves until we find them.”

“Worse?” Keith repeats. He holds out his arms. “Look around, Shiro. We’re totally lost.”

“No, we’re not,” Shiro tells him. “Because we’re not alone.”

Keith drops his chin to his chest and heaves a deep breath, forces it out in a rush. He hates how believable Shiro is, or maybe just how badly he _wants_ to believe it, even if he’s not sure Shiro really understands. There’s a difference between surviving as a prisoner and coping as an exile.

“Okay,” he says finally, looking up at Shiro’s unwavering expression. “I’ll try. But can we just get back to work for now? I think I know how we can get the power back up to a hundred percent. Maybe that’ll wake Red up.”

“Fine. A few more hours.” Shiro aims a finger at him. “ _If_ you agree to get some real rest after that.”

Keith tries to meet Shiro stance for stance, but it’s like forcing himself into a bad mould. He juts his head up. “I’ll rest as soon as the power’s back to normal.”

“All right,” Shiro sighs, dropping his shoulders and gesturing back down the cockpit’s access corridor. “Who am I to stand between the Red Paladin and his Lion? Lead the way.”

He has to do a little rummaging, but Keith manages to find a weak, grateful smile.

It takes four more hours, several painful shocks and a lot of cursing, but after Keith finally goes outside and physically crawls through part of the engine to find the problem, they manage to reroute enough energy around it for full operation.

When his Lion’s living _presence_ finally reappears in his head, blazing like a flame in a mirror, Keith laughs for the first time in days. He laughs until his vision blurs and his lungs fill all the way to the top again, cheeks hurting while Shiro groans in relief and perches on the edge of a console.

“That’s good,” Shiro breathes, flicking at strands of white hair stuck to his brow, dropping his forehead into his palm. “I don’t think I could take another jolt like the last one. My teeth haven’t stopped buzzing.”

Still grinning, Keith lets his head fall back and his eyes close, trusting Red to see for him, wandering into the mental feedback that rises to meet him. Now his vision goes for miles and miles, off past the curve of the world and down into unbelievable detail. He can hear the chiming of the air against the hull, feel the wash of dust and the uneven temperature, extend himself into space or through every inch of the inside of his Lion. He can see himself, lips curved up, lids closed, Shiro at his back.

He falls asleep right there, strength and power insulating him, freedom waiting for him, knowing Shiro’s nearby.

-|-

He wakes up too many hours later, alone in the cockpit, hungry and a lot more clear-headed. Making a quick stop for food and water, Keith heads out onto the dry, open plain. The light hasn’t changed, and everything still has the look of somewhere at war with itself, ash on one side and snow on the other, the sky about to tear away. He glances up, but he doesn’t recognise anything: there aren’t many stars out, this planet has no moons, and Keith’s never found home by standing on dirt anyway.

The Black Lion’s rampway is open, so Keith walks up and inside, coughing out the air that coats his windpipe harshly enough he wishes for the helmet he left behind.

Shiro doesn’t see him when he steps through the hatch, too busy sitting hunched in the middle of a spherical field of stars and planets, nebulas and pulsars, panning through them with tired sweeps of one hand. Keith watches as lines connect clusters of stars, forming and discarding patterns, watches Shiro’s mouth moving silently, a frown written along his face like another scar, pale light ghosting over him. He just watches, paused in the hatchway, finishing another ration bar.

“Nothing,” Shiro says under his breath, leaning back and rubbing at his face. Keith doesn’t twitch when Shiro looks over at him, but it’s a close thing. “We’re in a completely different part of the galaxy from where we entered the wormhole. I can’t match up any of the local constellations. My Lion can’t find the others or the Castle from this far out.”

It’s not the words that tow Keith further inside, digging hooks under his skin. Shiro looks frightened. It churns at him, clouds everything up like mud kicked up from the bottom of a pond. Now Keith wonders how long Shiro’s been trying this, searching and getting nowhere, then keeping it all to himself because he thinks that’s his job now.

_Stop acting like I don’t know what this is like_ , he thinks. _We’ve both been here before._

It doesn’t really take traumatic amnesia to make Shiro forget about himself.

Keith steps to the side of the pilot’s seat, passing into the floating projection, through tiny specks and glowing spirals, columns of figures and icons scrolling below them. It feels almost like being underwater. “We knew that was probably what happened,” he says. “We’ll just... have to go out and look.”

Shiro blinks up at him, glimmers revolving in his eyes and shadows ground in underneath them that weren’t so deep yesterday. “You want to search the entire galaxy? You know how long that could take, what the odds are that we’d ever find them?”

Keith shrugs, keeping as much of the uncertainty off his face as he can. He doesn’t know how Shiro does it. His hand taps against his thigh with the clumsy idea to reach out, make it better, but he doesn’t know how Shiro does that either.

“What else are we gonna do?” he says finally, staring with as much challenge as he can. It’s like tipping something overfull and hoping it spills in the right direction. “Give up?”

It works exactly like he wanted it to. Shiro frowns, then sits up and turns off the map. It leaves the cockpit suddenly close and strangely lonely, Shiro’s face scanning the panels and readouts. When he looks back at Keith, he’s the Black Paladin again, that _pull_ he uses to bring them all together and make the team work gathered back around him like his own weather.

The rush of Keith’s relief makes him feel like throwing up, even as it expands, comes up around him like a shelter.

“No,” Shiro says. “We’re not giving up. They need us, and a lot more people need Voltron.”

Arm coming up, Keith finally grips Shiro’s shoulder once, hard, and nods to the hatch. “Okay,” he says. “Good. That means I’ve got some flight tests to do.”

-|-

He’s running the last checks on the main laser, firing longer, increasingly charged blasts at some smallish rocks outside the planet’s orbit, leftovers of a moon that doesn’t exist anymore, still trying to get the emitters adjusted right when the Galra finally show up.

“Four ships,” Keith tells Shiro over the com, watching the Black Lion on his sensors as Shiro races for his position. “None of them bigger than a cruiser. Huh. They’re not trying very hard. I think I’m insulted.”

“ _It could just be a patrol_ ,” Shiro answers. “ _Or they were nearby and noticed all the shooting_.”

“Either way, it’s good target practice,” Keith says, Red’s eagerness echoing in his head.

“ _Take it easy, Keith. We only just fixed your Lion, remember?_ ”

Keith hears the warning, but he’s already turning, throwing power into the rest of his weapons as he avoids the first volley from the lead Galra ship.

“You coming, or am I taking care of these guys all by myself?” he asks, totally failing to keep the smile off his face.

“ _Oh, I’m right behind you_ ,” Shiro promises, and Keith sees the Black Lion’s signal getting closer, feels the recognition rebounding from one Lion to the other.

Keith grins wide and yanks the controls to one side as a blast slices through space towards him, launches his Lion up and over the small fleet. He scores four clean hits and watches as one of the ships vanishes in an expanding wash of flame and crackling energy, a second already losing control and going nose-down into a spin, a plume of violet coming from its engines like blood diffusing in water.

“Try to keep up,” he says, swinging around for another run. He’s not sure if he imagines Shiro’s low laugh in his ear.

Another ship explodes, and the Black Lion bursts through the wreckage, starlight swimming across its surface and catching on the debris scattering in all directions. “ _Count on it_.”

The entire battle lasts maybe three minutes. When it’s over, they move off to a point high above the nearby sun, in case the Galra send reinforcements along the same vector.

“ _Good work_ ,” Shiro tells him. “ _Your Lion okay?_ ”

“We’re both fine,” Keith says, shaking his head. “Stop worrying.”

“ _What d’you think the chances of that happening are?”_

“All right,” Keith says. “So, what now? Second star to the right?”

He definitely doesn’t imagine Shiro’s sigh. “ _It’s as good a choice as any_. _We’ll find a trail eventually._ ”

Keith takes a few moments to shut his eyes, trying to pick up on any instinct from Red about where the others might be. He looks past the familiar thread connecting to the Black Lion, out and out, away into the night without edges, an inverted desert where the sand is far-off light in a storm of particles and radiation.

Without looking, he hits the navigation controls, kicks into the highest velocity he can reach that won’t leave Shiro too far behind, trying to only think about the flying and the speed, not the odds or the distance.

Dozens of solar systems go by like that, days spent in a flipbook of suns, white and orange and red, without a trace of any Lions except for theirs. They pick up signals from Galra outposts and colonies and the ships passing between them, get close to planets that either never had life or just don’t anymore, and they avoid the ones that are teeming with Galra now, until finally Shiro insists on stopping.

“We’ve barely even started,” Keith says, slowing his Lion as Shiro brings his own in front. He’s already prickling under his skin, his hands flexing on the controls.

“ _And I don’t want us burning out in the first leg_ ,” Shiro answers. “ _If we’re not thinking clearly we could miss something, or worse._ ”

“They’re not _here_ , Shiro,” Keith snaps, beating the heel of his hand against one of the flight sticks. “If they were, our Lions would know. We need to keep going.”

“ _We will_ ,” Shiro says, calm and infuriating. “ _After we get some rest_.”

“Are you ordering me?” Keith asks, teeth grinding, his spine like iron. He only realises after he asks that he doesn’t know what answer he even wants. His fingers tighten up on the controls again.

_“No, Keith_ ,” Shiro says, and Keith wishes it’s less easy to picture the expression on Shiro’s face, the bags under his eyes and the tautness in his jaw, at the edges of his mouth. Wishes for the first time he was stuck out here by himself so he could just keep going, or with someone else, someone he could ignore without it wrenching in the pit of his stomach. _“I’m asking you_.”

Keith’s jaw creaks and his Lion strains at the tether, hating the idea of stillness with a constant pounding like a second heartbeat, knocking out _No time Too slow Push ahead_ up the length of Keith’s backbone.

“Fine,” he says, feeling it break off in the air. He wants to not feel the wordless, vaguely grateful pulse the Black Lion sends to Red. “We’ll do it your way.”

-|-

The world they find to land on has plants, moons and an actual day/night cycle this time.

Keith hurls his Lion to the ground, braking just a fraction before he takes out a grove of tall, thin trees with red leaves shaped like serrated arrowheads. He pulls off his helmet as he goes outside, biting back a yawn, shaking himself and facing into the breeze. It’s something like mid-evening, but it’s warm enough, and the planet’s two small, purplish moons are competing to cross the sky along with the early stars.

Keith looks around when the Black Lion comes in, a steady, clean descent that’s all control and pure Shiro. It lands softer than Keith bothered to, lowers its head to the ground.

“Nice flying,” Shiro says drily as he walks down the ramp, helmet under his arm. “You know that exercise of Coran’s only counts if you can’t see, right?”

Keith’s gaze flicks to where he knows Shiro’s still hurt, but it’s hidden under his armour now. He could shut his eyes, extend his arm and find the exact spot where the wound is. He grips the bottom edge of his helmet, fingers curled safely inside of it. He smirks. “Who says I had my eyes open?”

Shiro doesn’t respond to that, just sits on the mossy grass with a sigh like he’s been holding his breath for days. He puts his helmet down next to him and scrubs at his hair. Keith stands there watching while Shiro squeezes at the back of his neck before bringing his knees up, wrapping his arms around them. A pang of guilt runs through him, looking at Shiro so wiped out, even if he still doesn’t like stopping.

“Get some sleep,” he says, kind of awkwardly, a crooked olive branch.

“I will,” Shiro nods. He glances in the direction of the trees when something gives a deep, looping call not far away. “We should probably just sleep in our Lions.”

They both grimace. The Lions are huge, and there’s room for them to sleep, but it’s too much like the cramped bunks they had back at the Garrison for Keith, and Shiro never seems to get any real rest like that. Hunk and Lance think Shiro has some kind of unpredictable claustrophobia, but Keith’s pretty sure it’s the prolonged sense of being confined – not the walls being close, more the way they never change that gets to Shiro.

“We could take turns, if you want to stay out here,” Keith says. “But your Lion would probably wake you anyway if something was gonna go wrong.”

Shiro blinks heavily at him, then after too long he nods, frowning like he’s not quite tracking. “So long as you sleep too.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “I’ll sleep, okay? But you look like you’re about to pass out, so you can go first.”

“Oh, thanks,” Shiro scoffs, but there’s real gratitude in it.

Keith folds to the ground near Shiro, far enough not to crowd him, close enough to catch the way Shiro mutters to himself as he lies back, the words all smudged together. Keith’s heard him do it before, replaying training sessions or things they’d all talked about earlier, loosely-linked thoughts about what he wants to try next the time they form Voltron, like a ritual he has to run through before he can let himself stop for a while.

He doesn’t try to pick out what Shiro’s saying this time, and Shiro doesn’t really expect him to. Sometimes it’s enough to be sure the voice is really there, or to speak and know it’s not all just noise, unravelling without a trace.

Shiro tucks a hand behind his head, the other curled loosely on his stomach, closing his eyes. The clouds that pass over him are the colour of old print, like faded letters stuffed in a drawer. The breeze makes waves in the grass, standing it up where it got flattened by the backwash of their Lions landing and brushing the white of Shiro’s hair to one side. Keith points his face off towards the tree line when watching Shiro’s profile and the rise-fall of his chest starts to feel like theft.

There are mountains far off in the distance, grey and blue, turning to deep purple silhouettes as they carve up the sun between them. Keith doesn’t look back at Shiro until the day’s finished bleeding, leaning back on his palms, too tired to think about anything for long.

Between the moons and the stars it’s not all that dark; there’s enough light for Keith to see Shiro looking at him, eyes half-open and grass crumpled against his cheek, hairs on the nape of Keith’s neck standing up.

“We used to do this,” Shiro says. His voice is low and soft, like something crushed, but crushed carefully. Keith’s about to tell him they never did this, that he wouldn’t have forgotten, but the side of Shiro’s mouth he can see crooks, says, “Me and the other prisoners, I mean. We’d take shifts staying awake, even though we were always exhausted. We couldn’t stop the Galra taking us, but we’d at least know when they were coming, try to get the strongest ones to the front.”

The words tumble along each other, like whatever it is in Shiro that usually holds them’s gotten knocked over. It sets Keith’s nerves on edge, makes him feel like he should be helping Shiro keep it all in somehow, like there’s gauze for this, a restlessness like anger but less useful. There’s no point guessing where in the cells Shiro ended up standing, probably every time, no point saying anything about it now, just because Keith hates the image of it and Shiro shouldn’t always have to be so—

“It just felt... better,” Shiro says with a drowsy slow-motion blink, the light catching it like bits of mirror, covered and uncovered. “Having someone there.”

Keith’s mouth opens, starts to say things he’s worn into comfortable shapes, like old leather. That you can learn to live without it if you have to. That if you lie still enough and forget enough and not care enough, eventually you can hear how the wind talks to itself too, a story that’s bigger than you and goes around the world. How convincing it is when it’s just you. But he doesn’t _want_ to say them, not with Shiro watching, and now he can’t tell if they’re true anymore.

Maybe he just grew into them, like a tree with a jagged fence running through its insides, so silent that _hurt_ and _still alive_ are the same. Sleep with lost things and gone things for long enough, and they can get so convincingly heavy it’s like they’re still there. If you miss something, did it ever leave?

“Sleep,” he tells Shiro, trying to be firm without leaving a mark. Everything bruises easier at night. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

Shiro nods against the earth and turns his face away, expression slipping free. From where Keith’s sitting, the moons are braced either side of Shiro now, like pillars, draping watery light in a shroud over everything while the trees press close, whispering. He shivers slightly in his armour, remembering the caves he explored searching for the Blue Lion, the feeling of grasping at something uncontainable, his fingers almost wide enough to hold it anyway.

His eyelids slip for a second, and Shiro distorts, flattens to the landscape like a storybook picture, the sleeping king waiting for the right words, or the right time, or just to be needed badly enough—

“Keith.”

—He jerks, knocking himself over onto his back. One of his arms flies out and gets caught, his other fumbling halfway for his bayard before he registers daylight, the feel of grass, the noise of wind passing through leaves, and Shiro crouching in front of him.

Shiro tugs once at his wrist and Keith frowns, blinking away the dream that’s already diluting with the sun angling down. A yellow window frame painted shut in a dull brick wall, the smell of dust hovering over a bedspread, the sound of other kids playing outside. It’s nothing worth holding on to, just a pin stuck randomly in an orphan’s diary.

“Hey.” Shiro’s left hand goes to Keith’s right elbow, his prosthetic braced on his thigh as he jostles Keith slightly. “You in there?”

“Sorry,” Keith says, shaking himself, knuckling at the side of his eye, batting his hair aside. “Didn’t mean to fall asleep like that.”

Shiro stays balanced on his haunches in front of Keith. His hair’s sticking up at the crown and there’s a look in his eyes that says he’s trying not to laugh at Keith’s inability to ever be a morning person. There’s a memory there too, bright corridors and early classes, fingers folding Keith’s around a coffee cup. No place to keep that either now.

“Don’t worry about it,” Shiro says, letting go of Keith’s arm a second later. “It’s what we’re here for, right? And we didn’t get eaten in the night. I think the Lions are scaring away the local wildlife.”

Keith grunts and sits up, works a cramp out of his neck, waiting to stop feeling Shiro’s fingers on his skin before he talks. “Yeah, great. So are we heading out?”

“Soon,” Shiro says. He reaches around behind him, holds out something pink-red and round in his hand. “Turns out this planet has peaches.” He tilts his head. “Almost peaches.” He offers it to Keith. “It’s not bad, just kinda chewy.”

Blinking, Keith thinks about saying no, that he’s not really hungry, but Shiro’s right there, rested and seeming almost as young as he actually is. So he takes the fruit and tests it in his fingers, the skin tough and a little too thick. “Thanks.”

The first few bites are bitter, but it gives way to a sweeter aftertaste, and Keith catches another not-peach when Shiro tosses one his way out of a small pile he’s apparently picked from somewhere, the juice purple and staining their mouths. There’s a vivid orange stone in the middle of the fruit, and Keith pitches it as far as he can, almost reaching the trees. Shiro laughs and matches him throw for throw. After a while the pile of fruit’s gone, there’s a trail of stones disappearing into the trees and they both feel a little sick.

“Hunk would love this,” Shiro says with a half-smile, wiping at his chin with the back of a hand. “Pidge, too.”

“Lance would’ve thrown up by now,” Keith says. “Coran’d be officiating.”

Shiro huffs. “And Allura would come in at the end and out-throw us all.”

Before he can do anything about it, Keith says, “I didn’t think I’d miss them.”

“I did,” Shiro says.

They stand there silently for a few seconds, and then with a passing look at each other they head back to their Lions.

They’re in the air a minute later. Another minute and the planet is just a bright coin, shrinking until it’s lost between one star and another. Keith presses Red, accelerating until even light can’t keep up with them, Shiro alongside. He wonders pointlessly if anything will grow out of those stones.

-|-

They spend day after day searching in an ugly, mechanical rhythm, mapping their way across the galaxy with no pause, no slowing down, constantly chasing after a signal they can’t find. They fly until their level of fatigue makes flying stupidly dangerous, then they fall into a strung-out few hours of rest before doing it all over again.

They take their stops at planets, moons, asteroids with eggshell atmospheres, hunting for supplies or any people who might know something useful. Mostly they just see more and more devastation caused by the Galra, getting drawn into battles with groups of ships they can’t avoid, or others they find lurking at places they risk getting closer to.

The Galra force them to run breakneck through a heavily-guarded region of stars for so long that eventually Shiro takes a bad hit he would’ve avoided if he’d slept in the last three days. He’s out of contact for almost eight minutes, the Black Lion turning lifelessly in space while Keith tries again and again to raise him, getting hoarser and hoarser while panic turns him icy and numb, narrow-visioned like he’s watching from a cramped bunker far back in his own head.

When Shiro finally comes back on the com, the fear gets crushed under a flood of anger like a dam coming down, roaring all through Keith, aimed at nothing and everything around him, at their failing search and constant interruptions. At Shiro and himself.

It’s nearly enough to choke him, make him sick, and he collapses down into himself in the day and a half it takes to land and repair the damage to the Black Lion, his chest all full of cinders. By the time they get back into space and moving again, Keith’s gotten tired of shrugging Shiro off, but he can’t make himself talk without snarling, doesn’t like the way he sounds when he tries. Eventually Shiro just leaves him alone, and that’s worse.

A week goes by, and then two more with nothing. The few people they decide to try approaching either don’t know anything about Voltron or the Paladins, or they’re under Galran rule, or they just have no idea the rest of the galaxy is even populated.

Based on the number of ships and colonised planets they run across, they think they’re passing back through the outer reaches of Galran space, headed for something like the centre of the Empire. When their odds of surviving even passing near the more trafficked systems get stacked too high against them, their route gets wider, starts doubling back on itself. It means more days lost to the wrong places, too much time running and not enough left to really search, and every time Shiro calls for a detour Keith gets closer to refusing.

Somewhere near the end of the first month, Keith barges out of his Lion onto the shore of a churning grey sea and just walks, slipping on slick pebbles, spray and salt air stinging him, and keeps walking until he has to find his way back hours later in almost total darkness. It’s a vacant planet, but out in the endless span of water there are bones of decaying metal structures, parts of buildings sticking up like broken stems, arches hundreds of feet high that don’t connect to anything now, like ribs in a carcass that’s been picked clean.

Shiro’s still where Keith left him, sitting on a rock a little way from his Lion, in a weak beam of light casting down from its eyes. His head’s hanging between his shoulders and he’s got his forearms braced on his knees. He looks up when Keith crunches back across the beach, and Keith doesn’t know if it’s a trick of the light or if Shiro really is that run-down, hollow-cheeked.

“Feel better?” he asks when Keith drops like a rag doll to the wave-smoothed stones.

Keith doesn’t answer, _can’t_ answer, not without—he doesn’t know what he’d do, just that he’d resent himself for it later. He picks up a pebble and launches it off into the dark, hears it hit the foam and clack against one of the millions more just like it. Where the water slithers back at the edge of the light, the pebbles glisten like a spread-out collection of teeth. He picks up another one, but he can’t find the energy to throw it away. He thinks he wants to scream, but he can’t stuff enough air into his chest.

“I’m sorry, Keith,” Shiro says after Keith doesn’t know how long. His voice is as slumped as the rest of him.

Keith forces his head around, every movement difficult and sluggish. Shiro’s mostly just a milky shard of reflection coming off his armour, and from this angle his face is in shadow, but Keith can feel how Shiro’s watching him. His fingers wring out the cold, rounded pebble until it remembers being sharp once and bites at his skin.

“For what?” he asks, surprised by how rough it sounds. Suddenly he can’t remember the last time he spoke, or what he said. It’s a familiar rut, but it just makes his skin feel more unevenly dragged across his bones.

“For not getting us home,” Shiro says tiredly, like it’s obvious. Keith hates not being able to see his face. Shiro hides behind his voice too well.

_We don’t have a home_ , he wants to say, to be cruel, or to make Shiro tell him it’s not true. Maybe just to empty out some of what’s seething inside him. He lets the pebble fall from his hand. The sea hisses at him. He feels poisoned, but it’s only grief, or something related to it. Longing, maybe, which is like grief only aimed the other way.

“I know I’m letting you down,” Shiro tells him then, words almost getting drowned as the sea charges up the beach again, like something starving stuck on a leash. “All of you. I’m supposed to—”

“Shut up,” Keith spits, because this is the only thing more rotted-through than being stuck feeling what he feels. Everything’s too brittle, and all he really wants right now is to break it. There’s pressure capped-up behind his sternum, what a bomb feels before the shrapnel. “Don’t even—just shut up. Fucking shut _up_ , okay? It’s not your _fault_ , Shiro. It’s not. You want the blame? That what’s gonna make you feel better? Too bad.”

He clamps his teeth on his bottom lip to stop himself, until the taste of copper hits his mouth. He realises his fingertips are numb where he’s driven them into his palms like stakes, how his shoulders are shaking and his breath’s gone to ribbons.

“Sorry,” Shiro mutters, too soft for all this black water and cold, endless rock slowly being erased, for whatever haunts belong to the half-submerged, decomposing city that’s shaping angular marks into the sky. There’s no sturdiness anywhere, less all the time.

Keith aches all over as he forces his feet to hold him up, but he picks his way over to Shiro anyway. There’s not enough of him that knows how to be careful, and maybe he can’t change that. Sand away his edges and Keith doesn’t think he’d take up that much room. But he can try.

“Come on,” he says. “We’re not staying out here.” He’s standing close to Shiro, leaning over him, but the wind cuts past them just the same. At least he can turn his back on the sea, the graveyard it’s hiding.

Shiro doesn’t look up, bent in on himself. “We can’t fly anymore right now.” His voice is totally flat, but it knocks few battered-sore things in Keith loose, looking down at Shiro with his hands clenched.

He crouches, already tensing and awkward. It’s tricky, being unguarded on purpose. “I didn’t say we had to. Shiro. Hey. Just come with me,” Keith says, trying to draw Shiro up by one arm. It leaves his mouth more like a plea than he would’ve liked.

Shiro stands up, because of course he does, even limp-shouldered and pit-eyed. He balances heavily on Keith once he gets them walking, and Keith keeps a hold on him, both of them hobbling and staggering into each other all the way to their Lions. Keith thinks for a second and then nudges them in the direction of the Black Lion, hoping it’ll do Shiro more good if he’s closer to it.

They go up the ramp, through the narrow tube of a corridor, both squinting against the rows of lights along the ceiling until all of them quickly dim.

“Thanks,” Shiro sighs, reaching out to touch the nearest wall, his fingers trailing along it as they go, his other arm slung across Keith – the left arm again, nearly every time.

The area Shiro uses to sleep is basically an alcove between the cockpit and the small speeder bay, just a waist-high pallet of a unit that slides out of the wall, a black cushion passing for a mattress. Standing next to it, Keith can see the pilot’s seat, rolled back on its track. It’s even turned to face their way, and Keith spins it back from the bunk with a short kick.

“I could’ve got here on my own,” Shiro says while he sways slightly on the spot, looking lost between one motion and the next.

“I wasn’t bringing you here,” Keith tells him. He starts disconnecting pieces of his armour, stacking them on the floor. “I was coming with you.”

Shiro frowns like Keith just switched languages. “Why?”

His chest piece and gauntlets go with the rest, and Keith does a quick run-through of potential arguments before he turns around. “To keep watch.”

“Keith,” Shiro says, shoulders drooping, “I don’t need—”

“If I leave you here by yourself, are you really gonna sleep?” Keith asks, crossing his arms, down to the smooth alien material of his suit’s underlayer now. “Or are you just gonna spend the whole night stewing about how this is all your fault and it’s your personal task to fix everything, whether you can or not? ‘Cause I’ll be honest, that one’s getting kinda old.”

He scoffs when Shiro looks away. He’s still more annoyed that he wanted to be, less careful than he’s trying for, and more abandoned than he knows Shiro means him to feel. “Right. I figured.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Shiro says, clinging to that line by his fingernails. It might’ve had more impact if he wasn’t listing to one side.

_Maybe I need you_. _Would that be so bad?_

Keith comes close to letting that go thunking to the floor along with his armour. He jerks a shrug, arms folded tight. “If either of us had the energy left I’d say we could spar, clear our heads, but here we are. Get rid of the armour before you lay down; the bunk’s not that big.”

He sits, the solid cushion not sinking at all under him, puts his back to the wall and just waits. Normally Shiro would win this kind of contest no problem, but he’s not up to his usual immovable object routine right now, and there’s enough temper and other, more dangerous and unhelpful things slaughtering along under Keith’s skin for him to stick it out. Besides, Shiro wanted him to learn patience, he can deal with the result.

It’s another few seconds before Shiro realises Keith isn’t giving up, a delay that proves how drained he is all by itself. He fumbles with the armour, and a couple of times he has to shake his head and repeat the mental commands to make some of the seals release. He still takes the time to precisely stack every piece next to Keith’s though, all in the right order so they’re as easy to reach in an emergency as they can be. It’s the sort of automatic military habit the others usually poke fun at him for and that Keith finds hard to watch.

“What if you have to get to your Lion?” Shiro asks as he lowers himself to the edge of the bunk.

Keith waves a hand, decides it’s too heavy and drops it back down on his leg. “I guess I’ll run.”

Shiro lets out a snort that’s not a laugh and shakes his head, sliding back until he’s next to Keith, head tilting against the wall before he rolls his neck Keith’s way. He blinks slowly a few times, pieces of a frown trying to tie together across his forehead.

“What?” Keith says when he can’t stand the quiet, the distant way Shiro’s looking at him. He gets another blink, Shiro’s eyes ticking up from his cheek.

“It’s nothing,” Shiro says, distracted.

“Fair warning,” Keith tells him, knocking their shoulders together, “I’m gonna start hitting you every time you say that.”

Shiro makes the effort to smile, fragile as cobweb. “No, it was—I was just thinking about the first time I saw you fly,” he says, far enough from what Keith was expecting that he doesn’t trust that he heard it right, fatigue making him lose track.

“The first time,” he says. He can’t get at the memory, his brain fumbling like he’s drunk.

“It was only in the simulator,” Shiro says. “But still. You blasted right through every record the Garrison had, including mine.” He huffs. “Except for—”

“Aitken basin,” Keith groans, head thumping on the wall. “I remember.”

Shiro’s mouth quirks. “You ran that one, what, fifteen times before they revoked your access?”

“Seventeen,” Keith admits. “Counting the two times I got in with my roommate’s ID.”

“Probably a new record all by itself,” Shiro says, and Keith shoulders him again.

“It was bullshit,” Keith says. “I _told_ them the flight model was too slow, that the program couldn’t keep up with the adjustments. They just said there was no way to pull the ship out of a dive like that without hitting the lunar surface. That I was cocky, and I just wanted an excuse for failing.”

“So you stole a ship,” Shiro says, eyebrows raised. “And broke orbit. Just so you could prove them wrong.”

“And I did,” Keith tells him. “You know they rewrote the algorithms after they booted me? They teach that move to upperclassmen now.” Shiro might’ve had to learn it, if things had gone differently. Keith’s surprised how much that idea bothers him.

“Well, you did also take that deep-range antennae off the roof of the communications building,” Shiro points out.

Keith shrugs against the metal his shoulders are pressing on, smirking. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t there in the simulation. I told them the thing was outdated.”

“I’m sure they loved that,” Shiro says, voice uneven, biting his lip to keep from laughing right in Keith’s face. Keith’s smirk gets wider for a second, before the memory makes it taste bitter.

“They wanted to ground me,” he says. “Hold me back a semester.” The old resentment creeps in like a stiffness down his arms, itches like smoke in his throat, flashing back to that long table full of smug faces playing at being disappointed. “They said it didn’t matter if I was right, I still needed to learn discipline.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Shiro says, already bracing himself by the time Keith shoves him. “But I told them it was a waste of resources. That either you’d disobey again and put yourself in a worse situation trying to get back up there, or you’d quit outright and the Garrison would lose the best pilot we were likely to find in ten years of cadets.”

Keith stares at him, a surprised breath trapped in his chest. “You said that? To who, Hendrick? Or Ryu? I’m pretty sure they both hated me.”

“I said it to all of them, as soon as they asked how you managed to outperform my sim design,” Shiro says, watching Keith’s slow reaction with half an overtired grin. He lifts a shoulder. “It was the truth. If they’d asked me earlier I would’ve given you the clearance to change the program. They finally agreed it was better having you fly for us than somewhere else, or not at all, and they just stuck a reprimand in your file. Not your first one, either.”

“I didn’t know any of that,” Keith says after a minute, trying to imagine it, someone doing that for him – to imagine Shiro doing that for the person he was then. If it was anyone _but_ Shiro he wouldn’t be able to. “You never told me.”

Shiro waves a vague hand at him. “We didn’t really know each other then. And afterwards... I don’t know. I didn’t want you to feel like you owed me anything.”

_Too late_ , Keith thinks, almost says, pulling his knees up near his chest.

“I always wondered if you were watching,” he says, arms folding around his knees, fingers circling his wrist. “I did it because they said it couldn’t work, but still, I wanted—” He shakes his head.

He wanted what? Shiro’s attention? Someone who might actually understand, who could see that the flying was the only thing that mattered?

Someone who’d understand stepping over, going too high and too fast because you _know_ you can do it. Who else would that’ve been, other than Shiro? Who else would’ve gotten it enough?

Whatever else Keith is, it’s all rooted to the wings.

“Keith,” Shiro says then, suddenly careful. “Just... tell me you didn’t get yourself kicked out because I was—”

“No,” Keith says, jaw working, face turned forward now, away. “No, it wasn’t—I couldn’t figure out how to change, be who they wanted. Or maybe I just didn’t want to, not badly enough anyway.” He inhales, lets it spool out of him slowly. “All I had for as long as I could remember was who I _needed_ to be, or I was no one, and then they said it wasn’t good enough, that I had to be someone else.”

Himself, or someone they’d keep. It was never going to end well. But it was never really a choice.

“I get it,” Shiro tells him, and Keith can’t help looking at him, needing to see it, maybe for the first time. There’s just Shiro, tired and patient and good in a way that’s bound to get him killed eventually. “And I was watching,” Shiro says, quieter, his voice folded on itself, something soft tucked away, hidden in the wall of a violent place. “I always did after that, whenever I could. I love flying – I’m good at flying. But I remember watching you and thinking I’d never _feel_ it like that.”

“Wow, you really need to sleep,” Keith tells him, a little cornered.

“I mean it,” Shiro says. “Yeah, some of them resented you for it, and some of them were impressed, but I just...” He shakes his head, the movement slowed down, shadow scrolling from one side of his face to the other.

“What?” Keith asks, not quite a whisper.

“I just wanted to know you,” Shiro says, looking at him again. “We had a lot of good pilots, but you were – you _are_ – something else, Keith.”

“Right,” Keith says. There’s a hollow, heavy racket in his ribs. “Didn’t stop them taking it away from me anyway.”

Nobody left to save him from himself that last time. He can’t blame Shiro. He wasn’t interested in being saved.

“Did they?” Shiro asks, leaning into his side a little. “Did they just take it away?”

Keith’s mouth draws tight. He blows out a breath. “All right, so I helped,” he says. He tips his chin at the Lion around them, at his own outside. “But look what I got in the end.”

“All worth it, huh?”

Keith glances over, watches Shiro’s throat move as he swallows. “No,” he says. “Not all of it. I lost some things.”

“You got them back,” Shiro says, hands curling in his lap. “More or less.”

“More than I thought I would,” Keith tells him.

He smirks when whatever Shiro was about to say gets wiped out as he yawns epically, and the lights dim down more while they arrange themselves on the bunk. Keith fits his body down between Shiro and the wall, wondering if he’ll even be able to stay awake long enough to make sure Shiro doesn’t. They’re not really touching anywhere, but there’s warmth seeping from Shiro into the air between them.

After a minute Shiro says, groggy, “You can’t get out quickly from that side.”

“It’s fine,” Keith tells him, not opening his eyes, not sure if he can. “I’ll just kick you onto the floor.”

There’s no real sound when Shiro starts laughing for real, but Keith can feel his shoulders moving against the cushion, and he can’t help the spluttering, sleep-deprived and half-hysterical way it sets him off too, both of them trying to stifle it.

“Okay,” Shiro says, uneven, bent around a grin Keith can’t see, “so long as there’s a plan, I guess.”

Keith wipes a thin wet tear streak from his face against the cushion and sighs, breath choppy and mouth aching from the smile as his body gets heavier and heavier.

“You did change,” Shiro tells him, a blur of time later.

“It’s not as hard as you think it’ll be,” Keith says, voice a little muffled. “It’s the inertia that messes you up.”

He’s mostly asleep when Shiro says, “Thank you, Keith,” so quiet it could’ve been a dream. He drifts off the rest of the way before he can manage to say anything back.

Unusual for him, Keith only wakes up once before morning, a few hours later, drifting in the muddy, easy space between conscious and not. He’s warm all over, and when he moves he can feel how his chest’s fitted to Shiro’s back now, arm lying half across them both. His forehead’s tucked down to the nape of Shiro’s neck, fine short hairs prickling at him, and he can smell the skin there, or just the warm softness that doesn’t have a smell, just a feeling, like it’s woven all through him.

Keeping his lids closed so nothing has to try and find definitions for itself, Keith ignores the way his eyes sting a little, how his chest hitches. He’s still so tired.

There’s a brimming-over feeling in him, almost frantic, but nothing else has to exist right now, just his heart folding and unfolding in a fixed tempo like it’s never taken any effort at all to keep going, casually unstoppable.

In the quiet he can hear Shiro’s breathing, faithful as a hymn, confidence that at the end of this there’ll be something new, and it might even be what they hoped for. Keith decides to believe it. It makes it easier to sleep again. He leaves his arm where it is.


	2. Chapter 2

Shiro’s already outside when Keith puts his armour back on, shuffling down the ramp with a yawn into the cold, pale daylight, his feet hitting the beach with a clatter.

Shiro’s on a different rock this time, a long mostly flat slab a few inches high that he’s using to do push-ups. There’s less cloud than the day before, but the sky here always seems to be the colour of slate. The sun leaches the colour from everything, making Keith’s Lion stand out like blood on cloth and their armour as bright as bone. Distant black shapes of seabirds are circling in the air out over the water, clouding up from the taller ruins.

“Hey,” Shiro says when he spots Keith walking up, still counting under his breath, dripping sweat on the stone.

“Sleep well?” Keith asks, eyebrows raised. “Want me to put some rocks on your back?”

Shiro gives a winded laugh and stands up, sweeping the hair off his face, bright and smiling. Keith’s never noticed before, but Shiro’s flush comes up a little unevenly around his scar. “I was just warming up. You still feel like sparring?”

Keith points a thumb over his shoulder, aware of the bead of sweat trailing down Shiro’s neck even though he’s trying not to be. “Shouldn’t we get going?”

“Soon,” Shiro says. “But I’m starting to feel a little rusty, and I figured we could always use the training.”

“Okay,” Keith shrugs, a little belatedly. It’s hard not to see the less rigid way Shiro’s holding himself, all the places Keith’s gotten used to seeing locked with tension just slightly freer. He squares his shoulders, brings his hands up. “Just don’t expect me to go easy on you.”

It doesn’t take long for Keith to admit Shiro was right. They start slow at first, but as soon as they’re really moving, he can feel his energy coming back, his head clearing like he wasn’t really awake before, not quite alive.

He strikes out and Shiro blocks. He uses his speed and size to dodge around moves of Shiro’s that would’ve knocked him back while Shiro tries to turn his momentum against him. Kicks and punches blend together, the rhythm getting faster while the water crashes nearby and their Lions stand behind them, until everything else drops far away.

Keith’s breathing gets sharper, knocking Shiro’s more powerful hits to the side and only staying in reach long enough for his next swing to collide with Shiro’s armour, just to make his point. His muscles burn, sweat leaving his hair lank across his neck. Time doesn’t matter, only where Shiro’s feet are gonna put him next and how Keith send get him off balance. It’s the most sense the world ever makes while he’s not in the air.

Eventually Shiro raises a hand to call a break, and they stand there on the rock, ringed by knocked-away pebbles, both panting loudly, sore-limbed, grinning at each other. Keith’s blood pounds in his skull, but he’s lighter, looser across the shoulders. It’s the best he’s felt in days, maybe weeks.

“You drop your elbow too much,” Shiro says once he gets some of his wind back.

“I’m usually holding a sword when I do this,” Keith says. “And you keep letting me get too close. It leaves your side open.”

Shiro nods, accepting the pointer for what it is. “All right. Up for one more round?”

Keith’s smile gains more teeth. “You’re really asking?”

“Use the sword this time,” Shiro tells him. “I wanna see how it changes your balance.”

Keith looks at him. “You want me to attack you with the sword? You’re not the Castle’s gladiator.”

“Technically,” Shiro says, raising his prosthetic with the fingers flattened together, a burst of purple energy lighting up his face, making dark shadows dance around them. The power hums though the air, until Keith can almost feel it coming up through his feet. “I kind of am.”

Straightening, Keith’s flexes his hand out by his thigh, and his bayard forms into it, his sword flashing into place. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

One bout already behind them, there’s no preamble to this one. Now Keith wants to _win_.

He feints to the left and then darts forward, swinging low. His sword rings off Shiro’s forearm as he knocks the blade aside, turning while he jumps a step back. Keith’s already changed directions, lunging in from Shiro’s left and forcing him to cross his body with his stronger arm to block, left hand bracing for a shove at Keith’s shoulder.

Keith aims a punch low at Shiro’s gut with his free hand, but Shiro manages to knock the sword away. He grabs Keith’s elbow, pulling him around with a thin whirring from his arm. Stumbling, Keith locks a hand above Shiro’s wrist and _heaves_ , heels digging in. It staggers them both in a rough spin, sends them off the rock and onto the shifting ground of the beach.

Shiro’s fingers are still tight on his arm, and Keith drop his hold, turns to drive his shoulder against Shiro’s chest. But Shiro turns with him, stepping in this time, grabbing him tight enough to clamp his arms to his sides. Sword stuck parallel with his leg, Keith’s breath gets knocked free when Shiro’s chest hits his.

“Nice move,” Keith says, looking up into Shiro’s damp face, adjusting his grip on his bayard, swallowing until his voice evens out. Shiro’s arm tightens around his middle. “But you still let me get too close.”

“And your elbow was still too low,” Shiro says, eyes intent on Keith’s. His mouth twitches when Keith tries to yank free and quickly jab him in the ribs with the elbow. It feels like a long time before Shiro lets him go.

Pulling away and circling Shiro slowly, full of nothing but the one moment, Keith watches Shiro for the hint of muscle bunching, giving him away right before he tries to press forward. He drops almost flat when Shiro comes in with a sideswipe, sends a short surge of power to his suit’s jetpack to slide him underneath Shiro’s guard, feet scraping.

Shiro leaps over the knee-high arc of Keith’s sword without even looking and spins, kicking out at Keith’s shoulder. He quickly hits his knees to seize Keith’s arm as he tries to bring the blade around and down again.

“Okay,” Shiro says tightly, face held back, but still near enough to see the vein in his temple beating. “Enough, Keith.”

Keith grunts through his teeth, fighting to overcome Shiro’s push on the sword until Shiro’s other hand sends him tipping backwards. Feeling the fall coming and yelling in frustration, he snatches at Shiro’s arm again and kicks Shiro’s left foot hard to the side.

They both go sprawling. The rough rock cuts into Keith’s cheek, making him bite through his lip as his bayard rattles out of his fingers, dispersing into energy again. There’s a low buzz close by as the power fades from Shiro’s hand, but Keith’s already rolling.

Side thumping into Shiro’s, he catches Shiro’s wrist and throws it away as he comes up, shifting his weight until he’s pinned Shiro with a knee on his chest, flattening him.

It leaves him hovering over Shiro, one fist braced against the rock by Shiro’s left shoulder, his other hand keeping Shiro’s right arm down. His lungs are burning dry and his chest is heaving so much he can see it through his armour. Out of focus, a drop of sweat falls from a limp strand of his hair and lands on Shiro’s chin, trailing to his throat. His skin feels too tight, shrinking back from the heat in his veins.

“Too close again,” he says, even though it scrapes and claws the roof of his mouth.

The hand Shiro can still move comes up slowly, up and up. Hovers there. Brushes Keith’s cheek. It throws him more than the fall did.

“You’re bleeding,” Shiro says, fingertips held just under the scrape Keith can’t even feel. The stark white of Shiro’s hair is glued down with sweat. His jaw is all stubble, and there’s white in that too, low on his chin and partway down his neck, catching the light near where his next swallow shows. The white of something erased.

Hazily, carelessly, Keith wonders if there’s red on Shiro’s fingers now, if it shines on his teeth from his split lip when he grins. Wonders if he turned his head just a little, would Shiro’s fingers taste of just him, or both of them. It wouldn’t take much to know.

“I still won,” he says, pressing his knee down just a little, breaking Shiro’s exhale. If Keith looked up, he’d see the tide crawling in a tantrum over having nothing to fight but itself. He wants to laugh, or yell, or come apart. He wants the same way he does everything else, too much and right now. He doesn’t _know_ what he wants, but that doesn’t stop it.

Shiro stays still, watching Keith from flat on his back, until the throbbing in Keith’s knuckles against the ungiving stone reaches him and the flicker of pain spreads across his cheek, the trembling in his muscles as the adrenaline fades. With no warning, Shiro’s legs come up in a vice around Keith’s waist, he _moves_ and the ground tilts. The back of his head bumps on rock, and Keith’s looking up instead of down.

“Did you?” Shiro asks, puffing for breath, head level with Keith’s, body curled down over him. It gives Keith no sight of anything except Shiro’s eyes, dark and flecked and almost gold, and the sky, bleached and nearly empty. Then Shiro leans in and that’s gone too. “You shouldn’t leave yourself in reach of a stronger opponent.” He manages the lecturing tone, but it’s almost thin enough to see through.

Keith prods at the swollen, sensitive part of his bottom lip with his tongue, sees the tiny shift in Shiro’s attention, just a little snap-release in his gaze. He feels Shiro’s grip slide and then readjust on his shoulder.

“I still have one advantage,” he says, making himself go limp a little more. Shiro’s knees are still lined up with his hips, straddling him. Keith puts his hand loosely on Shiro’s side, fingers spread, slides it up.

“Which is,” Shiro says, quiet even in the thimble’s worth of air between them. He’s closer now, eyes climbing and falling between Keith’s eyes and his mouth. Keith’s heart blunders around, running into walls.

Air slides out through Shiro’s teeth when Keith licks his lip again, and Keith feels it scatter on his skin, right before he bends his leg up, locks it against Shiro’s thigh, hand tightening under Shiro’s arm, and he uses all his weight to roll them one more time in a tangle of joints and lost breath.

Lying half on Shiro and half across a scatter of pebbles, Keith leans his face over Shiro’s, holding himself up with a hand on Shiro’s chest. “My opponent fights fair,” he says, and tips his chin to nudge his coppery, still-wet mouth against Shiro’s.

The fresh pain in his lip repeats with his pulse, but then Shiro makes this _sound_ in his throat and Keith can’t focus on it anymore.

It’s not much of a kiss, since most of it crumples between Keith’s mouth and Shiro’s, mixing with the blood on Keith’s, the next shaking groan that trips out from Shiro’s when Keith’s tongue slips against his.

It’s all teeth and the way Shiro’s lips part. It’s how he’s stopped breathing and the itch of Shiro’s stubble. It’s flawed and it’s rushed and it hurts, and Keith wants to shut himself inside it.

It ends when Shiro forces himself aside and up, to his feet and then away, fast enough that Keith doesn’t have time to stand all the way before Shiro says, “I’m sorry, Keith. I wasn’t—I shouldn’t have done that.”

The quiet is like drowning. Shiro keeps his back to Keith, shoulders dropping as he breathes, hands balling and flexing out over and over. There’s some kind of collapse happening in all the red and crackling parts of Keith, like a boot crashing through a bonfire.

He’s moving before he really decides to do it. His hands are on Shiro before he really decides to lift them. Shiro turns when Keith yanks at him, but his eyes are anywhere else.

“You’re sorry,” Keith repeats. He can still feel the kiss, the upward rush that came with it. And the anger. He’s better with that, so he gives it room, drags away the afterimage of Shiro looking up at him and the way Shiro sounded. “Because I’m not her?”

Shiro flinches, going pale. Keith tries viciously to make it be enough, to quickly mend himself with it. It doesn’t cover anything.

“It’s not like that,” Shiro says, and his eyes finally hit Keith’s face like a shipwreck.

“You’re gonna have to do better,” Keith hisses, meaning _Don’t, just don’t do this_ , shaking him. “What, is it because you’re the leader? You think I’m gonna stop following you if you—I’ve followed you this far, Shiro. I’m _still_ following you.” He shouldn’t have said Shiro’s name, he thinks as his voice splits against it.

“I can’t be what you want,” Shiro tells him then, standing there, unfighting and too small in Keith’s grip.

It should sound like an apology, and maybe it would from anyone else. From Shiro it’s just simple disbelief, like another old ruin, everything gone before they even saw it with nothing left to change.

“That’s _not up to you_ ,” Keith says, his voice flying out, scratching all along his airway. He shoves at Shiro’s chest and watches him take a resigned step back, looks at his own hands, useless with nothing in them.

Shiro shakes his head. “I just mean—Keith, you deserve—”

“What,” Keith snaps. “ _What?_ You think you know enough to tell me?” He doesn’t mean to stumble closer to Shiro. “Maybe you can you tell me why I’m angry all the time, why nothing I get ever lasts?” He doesn’t mean to hit Shiro again. He can’t tell if what’s running slowly towards his chin is blood. “Or hey, maybe you can tell me what happened to my parents, if you know so much, if they’re really dead or if they just didn’t want me either.”

He’s trying to stop, but the collapse isn’t done with him. His nails chew into his palms, muscles wound and pulling until he thinks his bones are gonna crack. He lurches forwards again, but he can’t make himself lash out, can’t stand getting the same placid reaction. “Come _on_ ,” he yells. “Tell me what I deserve. _Tell_ me. I’ve always wanted to know.”

The words ricochet down the beach, along the flatness between the steel-coloured clouds and the greedy tide. Keith’s mouth tastes like salt and bile and copper, but it still feels kiss-bruised. He’s frozen in his armour, and he’s angry enough he thinks it should kill him. No one should be able to live with this inside them. It’s not fair.

“Someone better,” Shiro says, killingly gentle. Then, quieter: “Someone whole. Someone good.”

Keith coughs up what might be a laugh, if you’d never heard a laugh before. Nothing he tries to say gets as far as his mouth – it still belongs to a few minutes ago, to a different Keith who knew reckless from stupid and _want_ from _mustn’t_. So he pries his feet off the ground and walks away, doesn’t stop until he gets to his Lion.

“Keith,” Shiro calls after him, halting, like there was meant to be something after but he doesn’t know what it was.

Without turning around, not even pausing on the ramp, Keith says, “I’m not looking for better, Shiro. The galaxy’s not that big.” He doesn’t know if Shiro heard him. The hatch whispers closed.

He gets to the cockpit by memory, seeing nothing, throwing himself into his connection with Red as hard as he can. The controls find his hands and just _know_ how to use them. His lion rips away from the ground and through the clouds, then the atmosphere, out into space, faster and faster.

Keith doesn’t wait for Shiro this time. He’ll follow or he won’t.

When the Black Lion takes off behind him and fights with everything it’s got to keep up, Keith can’t stand how relieved he is. He lets his lead on Shiro grow until Shiro’s voice is in his ear, asking him to pull back, _telling_ him to slow down like Keith’s in a nosedive instead of tearing through a vacuum. Like he’s already forgetting. Like he thinks there’s any kind of going back.

It’s the last subdued, nervous, “ _Keith, please. Don’t,_ ” that makes him throttle down, makes him let the Black Lion close in again. At least he made Shiro understand some of what it feels like, being held just a little behind the thing you could’ve destroyed yourself wanting, not being enough to hold on to it.

Around him, the cockpit displays are a red watercolour. He can’t see the planet now, doesn’t try, and the sun is just another interruption in the dark.

They keep pace with each other after that, in silence, never quite side by side.

-|-

More days and more light-years slough off behind them, longer and even more empty. They’ve refined their search pattern well enough by now that they don’t need to talk about it. Not long ago Keith would’ve been grateful for that.

Between one star and another, he wonders idly, like picking at a scab, if Shiro’s thought about what they’ll do if the Castle’s jumping around the galaxy looking for them, if they’re stuck in a shell game they can’t stop playing.

They sleep in their Lions without landing when they sleep at all, autopilot keeping them in formation, alarms rigged for anything and everything. Each unavoidable break only gives them the bare minimum they need to fly without making a fatal mistake, to mostly trust their eyes not to play tricks on them.

Keith doesn’t offer to keep watch, and neither does Shiro. He lies curled on his bunk, tired enough to be nauseated, his body with nothing left to give, his head full of things with nowhere to go, like bugs in a jar. He stares across the narrow space at his helmet, as far away as he can leave it when he doesn’t need to hear the com, waiting, wanting, sick of both.

Every day, Red gets more difficult to handle, increasingly volatile as Keith’s control turns more threadbare, and their next fight with the Galra is a pathetic joke of near misses and screw-ups. Three ships turn into nine when they fail to jam the Galra’s transmissions in time, and they get themselves separated on opposite sides of the firefight. When Keith loses track of his surroundings because of the effort of reining his Lion in, he’s almost driven too far into a gas giant by the lead capital ship, pummelled down, deeper into the planet’s storming upper layers while he tries to break free.

He’s still cursing out the blaring warnings, swearing at Red, practically breaking his arms dragging at the controls when the Black Lion roars down, cutting through the fleet. Shiro turns half a dozen fighters into glowing dust, then shears the attacking ship’s engine section cleanly away, letting it fall past Keith and disappear into murky clouds to be crushed by the pressure.

“ _We can’t be doing this_ ,” Shiro says once they’re back in open space, away from the field of burning debris and endless broken sentry parts spilling out of cracked hulls like seedpods. “ _We’ll get ourselves killed._ ”

“Maybe we should just split up,” Keith answers, hearing himself say it, watching his hands twist themselves white, feeling the blood wheeling through him and not understanding any of it. It’s probably how Red experiences having him for a Paladin. “We might have a better chance of actually finding—”

“ _No_ ,” Shiro says, louder now. “ _No_ _way, Keith. We stay together._ ”

“Are we together, really?” Keith asks bitterly. “Or just in the same place?”

“ _Keith_ ,” Shiro sighs. “ _We’re still a team_.”

Keith chokes on a sick laugh. “We’re not even half a team.”

There’s silence for a few seconds while Shiro struggles to be noble. Keith suffocates his voice to keep it still. There’s a tight pain in his side he thinks is a pulled muscle, and he stretches into it until he can’t take a breath.

“ _Please, Keith_ ,” Shiro says finally, gone almost fragile, unsteady. It topples too many of the things Keith needs to lean on, brings them down one after the other. He can never build any of it strong enough. “ _I_ _need you with me_.”

“As what?” Keith mutters through his teeth. He’s never met a ledge he didn’t like better after walking over it, or standing at the bottom and staring up.

“ _What you’ve always been_ ,” Shiro says quietly. “ _My friend._ _My good right arm_.”

Keith’s gut contracts. He forces himself cruelly hard into the seat. “Then you shouldn’t have kissed me back.”

More silence. Keith’s vision gets brighter and darker with his heartbeat. It’d be so much easier if it was all really, permanently broken – if he could just smash it apart instead of all this scuffling in a minefield. If he could make Shiro help him do it. Compromise has never been his style.

“ _Yeah,_ ” Shiro sighs, _“I know. I’m sorry_.”

Something’s clogging Keith’s throat, balled up and barbed. He knows he used to be better at living like this, but remembering that only makes it worse now, like he’s failed twice. “Then why did you?” He winces at his voice, how small it is.

“ _I wasn’t thinking,_ ” Shiro says. “ _Or I was, but about the wrong things._ _Because I try not to be selfish, and sometimes it doesn’t work._ ”

“Great,” Keith sneers, mouth twisted up, full of a sour taste. “You know that’s bullshit though, right? What, you’re not allowed to want things, be human? You think that makes you better? If you wanted to be a martyr so bad, Shiro, you should’ve stayed dead.”

If he strains his ears, Keith can hear Shiro breathing. “ _You asked_.”

“And you still kissed me back,” he says. “So at least we’re both being honest now, I guess.”

Keith hits a key and shuts the channel down before Shiro can answer. Then he slams the controls and gives up as much of his awareness to his Lion as he can, a chase that’s all fickle rage and impulse. He loses the separation between them, fire blending into fire, but he can’t make himself care. He still knows exactly where Shiro is. It’s still not over. They haven’t finished anything.

-|-

The stalemate lasts another leg of the search, until the need for real rest and more supplies takes over, and because the idea of staying in their Lions another day is making them both even more twitchy.

They touch down in an open field, around midday on a planet that’s feral with jungles and bustling rivers. They make sure to come down far away from the clustered huts and ribbons of smoke from a local civilisation that has no idea about anything past their own sky yet, as far as they can tell.

From the corner of his eye, Keith watches Shiro drag his feet down the Black Lion’s ramp, the slow and stiff way he moves, the heavy hang of his shoulders as Shiro walks his way. He stops near Keith, scratching at his jaw. The air’s thick, humid, and alive with small brown whirling pods that might be plants, might be animals, or could be something else completely.

“You need to shave,” Keith says, eyes scanning the wide-trunked trees for something edible that isn’t a ration bar or anything else just as palatable that they’ve got left over in storage.

“You could use a haircut,” Shiro replies, after a pause that’s full of the warbling of what almost sound like birds, striving so hard for casual Keith can’t bear looking at him. He catches one of the fingernail-sized brown pods and watches it come apart, papery and dry, leaving tiny green flecks on his fingers.

Shrugging, Keith pulls a small knife from his belt. It’s not his old one, the one Lance calls _A survivalist’s security blanket_ , just a simple tool, but it’s Altean-made and unbelievably sharp. He can feel Shiro’s gaze instantly swing to him, like it has its own heat, and he spitefully enjoys it for a second.

Keith puts the knife between his teeth, the faint blue handle like unbreakable enamel, and combs his hair back with his fingers. He spits the knife into his palm, holding his hair one-handed at the back of his skull, and cuts through it in a quick sawing pull, the blade so sharp he barely feels any resistance. The breeze plucks the loose hair from his grip, fans it out into nothing, and the shorter strands fall around his ears and move against his cheek.

“It’s a little uneven,” Shiro tells him, sounding wary, like he’s wandered too close to something dangerous. Keith tries to enjoy that too.

“Then it’s perfect,” he says. He offers the knife blindly to Shiro, putting it away again when Shiro doesn’t take it. “C’mon. We’re wasting daylight.”

They spend a few hours picking through the jungle for anything the equipment in their suits reads as non-toxic, staying in sight of each other as they work, keeping silent except to point out whatever they’ve missed.

Shiro pauses when something large and birdlike with tufts of iridescent blue-green feathers lands on a high branch near him, turning its wide head to stare, blinking sharp yellow eyes. Its beak opens around a haunting call that sends a shiver running down Keith’s back, but Shiro’s face is all open wonder as it spreads four impossibly delicate wings, almost transparent and refracting like a prism. The wings scatter coloured light across Shiro like he’s standing in front of stained glass, painting his armour and tinting the white of his hair.

“Shiro,” Keith says guardedly when Shiro’s fingers reach slowly for the animal’s ruffling chest. He’s bracing his feet to move, but the thing makes its eerie cry again and sails up into the air like it weighs nothing at all, Shiro turning on a heel to watch it. It leaves him facing Keith’s way, but Keith’s got his back to Shiro by then, kneeling and breaking roots out from the dark soil. His hair still hangs in his eyes.

Back at their landing site, Keith sits on a low rise in the stalks of yellowish grass while Shiro packs away the last of what they’ve collected. He tests at his connection to Red like a loose tooth, feels it pull taut too easily, setting off a headache, and he tries to shore up his control again.

Shiro joins him eventually, sitting cross-legged an arm’s length away, offering Keith some of the food, still not talking while they eat or after they’re done. The sun’s on the other end of the sky now, and that side of the world is slowly turning pink as the air cools and the jungle’s overlapping voices get louder. The little pods have all sunk down to the ground, just a few left reluctantly falling here and there.

Long flat shadows spread gradually across the tops of the trees and spill into the field. They stay sitting without saying anything, and maybe they’re both too tired, or they’re busy trying to shape themselves around what’s stabbing up between them. Keith rubs his hands through the grass, trying to decide if effect matters more than cause, or if you can ever pull them apart enough to tell.

He doesn’t like Shiro’s definition of selfish, imagines himself saying _You make me lonely_ and then can’t figure out which one of them he meant it for.

“Maybe we should stay another day,” Shiro says after a while. Keith doesn’t mean to meet his look, but Shiro’s already there when he turns his head. It still feels like he’s been caught, even if he’s already confessed.

Shiro’s eyes are bloodshot, dark grooves stamped under them, and Keith’s probably aren’t much better. “There’s that stream not far from here,” Shiro adds. “We could take a look tomorrow.”

_Just admit you can’t keep going like this,_ Keith thinks. “The locals might use it.”

Shiro lifts a shoulder. “The nearest village is miles away. We can set a sensor to warn us if anyone comes too close.”

Keith’s headache’s getting worse. _Tell me you need this. Ask me to wait. I’m good at waiting when the other choice is giving up._

“Fine,” he says, sitting back, arm propped up behind him. “One more day.”

Shiro folds his hands in his lap, head sinking low like he’s already asleep. Like maybe he hasn’t left his pilot’s seat since the last time they landed. Their last beam of sunlight shrinks until it’s just a thin strip, a crack in a door. The quiet piles up on all sides, the sound that dares make when nobody accepts them.

Palms itching when he curls his fingers, eyelids scratching as he glances at Shiro, his heart the same war it’s always been, some kind of cord in Keith stretches past its limit. It breaks, just done, the ledge suddenly behind him and his feet planted on nothing.

He leans to one side and puts a hand on Shiro’s shoulder, waits for Shiro to look at him. He took his gloves off back in the jungle, and he’s still got dirt on his fingers, little smudges that come off on Shiro’s armour, black crescents crammed under his nails.

“It’s okay, Shiro,” he says, as a start, driving his weight down into his feet to feel how the earth pushes back. He scrapes his heel across the ground, leaves a shallow gouge. Just to change something.

Shiro eyes him from under his lids, not really lifting his head. “Is it?”

Keith blows a rough breath past his lips. He’s been scraped too narrow, too flint-edged. Every little gesture comes with sparks now. “I don’t know,” he admits with a shambling, worn-out little smile.

“Neither do I,” Shiro says.

“We’re not who we should be,” Keith tells him. “And we’re getting slower.”

Shiro swallows, nods raggedly. “We’re tired.” His eyes trip up to Keith’s. “Aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” Keith sighs, grip almost slipping. “Yeah, we are.”

The smile Shiro offers him is thin, but he covers Keith’s hand with his, all cool, dry skin and solid grip. His thumb bumps along Keith’s knuckles, and Keith tries to smile back. His throat’s pinched almost closed.

“At least we’re being honest,” Shiro says.

Keith draws in air, carefully. “Right.” Then, because he needs to, he says, “There’s no better, y’know. Not that I care about. I’m not gonna pretend there is just because you are. And I’m not sorry.”

Is that courage, to just take the knife to the walls, veering right for the fractured places instead of away? Keith doubts it, but there’s no one impartial around to ask.

Shiro’s gaze slips to the hand still in his lap, metal fingers bending, machinery humming. Keith’s not sure Shiro’s even aware he’s doing it. “I know what I am, Keith. Even if I don’t remember all of it... it’s enough. There’s parts of me that—”

Keith waits, but Shiro doesn’t finish. It takes a painfully firm grip on Shiro’s shoulder before he looks up again.

“I know you too,” Keith tells him. “You’re not the only one who remembers. You ever consider that maybe it’s not that easy, that we’re both right? I could live with that. Couldn’t you?”

Compromise. He could learn.

_Why be ashamed?_ He wants to ask, except he already knows. It’s the decent thing, not to go unpunished. Shiro never had his time in the desert.

_You think I don’t understand? That I’ve ever trusted all of me?_

Shiro’s fingers fit a little tighter on top of Keith’s. “That’d be nice,” he says softly, not in one piece.

Keith’s never going to be able to explain how it’s true whether Shiro believes it or not, that Shiro still has this whether he accepts it or not. That Keith’s not going to start regretting now, when none of it’s new enough to regret. He made his choice, way back.

Slowly, he spreads his fingers until Shiro’s criss-cross between them, swallowing hard and dry. “So,” he says carefully, “what’s stopping you?”

“I’m not sure,” Shiro says, curling his fingers, touching Keith’s palm now, just holding on.“Maybe I’m not as brave as you.” But he doesn’t stop Keith from moving them together, getting closer in the measured, cautious way two wounded things are left with.

Shiro doesn’t stop Keith from lifting both their hands and drawing Shiro’s arm across him. When he’s near enough for Keith to see the shift in his pupils, the heavy drop of his throat, he brings his face closer. There’s still a sceptical softness written around Shiro’s mouth, like pain that’s gone too suddenly to trust, but his arm wraps harder around Keith’s side anyway.

“I know you,” Keith says again, holding himself still now, letting Shiro do the moving. “You know me.” They can admit that much without flinching at least. You can build belief by stacking small acts of faith. “I know what you are.”

“What?” Shiro asks, like he’s halfway off a cliff, full up with tilting. Waiting for the fall.

“Someone whole,” Keith tells him, hands spreading out on Shiro’s arms, his chest. “Someone good.”

Shiro’s expression blurs when their foreheads hover just short of touching, breathing the same air. Shiro’s mouth opens a little more, maybe with the same words in his throat as Keith. The sun’s nearly gone, but Shiro’s eyes are bright.

It’s not surrender Keith’s waiting for, just a sort of catching up, a _hereness_ where the fear matters less and less.

“Keith,” Shiro says, like it fits somewhere, right where it should be, and when the air it’s made of touches him, Keith thinks he can taste it.

Shiro kisses him. Kisses him again. Brings his forehead tight to Keith’s, nose brushing Keith’s cheek, and kisses him slower, like he’s trying to make the same choice over and over, until it feels like as much of a choice as it can.

Keith’s hands press at Shiro’s armour until his muscles start trembling. His mouth slips open for Shiro’s tongue and his teeth leave marks on Shiro’s lips. He’s not afraid, doesn’t want to be. _You didn’t die_ , he thinks, breath skewing wetly along Shiro’s skin. _Except you did, but it was still brave._ Shiro died impossibly far away and on screens in official pictures, commendations glowing on his chest, in sad frowns on officers’ faces and the faces of cadets who never knew him at all, just that they’d lost something anyway.

Shiro kisses him, and Keith pushes up into it, harder every time, until his lips are clumsy and he can feel the scratches from Shiro’s stubble. His hand’s a tight fist on Shiro’s back, and Shiro didn’t die every time someone said his name like they were using up a little more of it, the way they’d cut it open to pour _pilot error_ inside like molten lead while Keith thought about throwing punches.

Keith’s already there to meet him next time, smuggling little shards of air and sound out of his chest. Shiro was dead for longer than Keith knew him before, but now they’re here, outside of it, and maybe they’re lost, but they don’t have to stay that way. Shiro groans right into him, the sound filling the cage of Keith’s ribs, his hand cupping the back of Keith’s neck, and whatever they’re trying to be, it’s enough to build on. They can keep treading the same ground until the grass regrows one acre at a time, even if it burns again.

Now Keith just _wants_. Wants to give and have and ask, but he wants this more: Shiro groaning like it’s escaping from down in his belly with his hand on the back of Keith’s head, fingers carding through his hair, other arm around Keith’s waist. He wants the way Shiro buries his face in Keith’s neck when Keith’s leg slots into the gap between Shiro’s. He wants the shudders that Shiro doesn’t even try to hide. He wants this, just this, because it’s already here.

“I don’t know if I’m safe,” Shiro breathes, damp against the skin under Keith’s ear.

_I don’t care about safe,_ Keith almost says. _Just you_. _Not being safe has never stopped me._

It wouldn’t be good enough, not for Shiro with his need to protect everyone from anything, including himself. Maybe especially himself. Keith doesn’t have the right set of words for this, so he holds on to Shiro even harder, pulls him closer, hoping it’ll add up the same.

Eventually Shiro pulls back, his hands falling to Keith’s hips, both of them kneeling up in the grass. Keith keeps his eyes on Shiro’s, waiting for Shiro to really see.

“If I—” Shiro starts, stumbling. “If I do something to—”

“You won’t,” Keith tells him, no room for movement, not taking his hands off Shiro’s side, his arm, whatever he can touch.

“I might,” Shiro says, too quiet, too scared. “What they did to me, it’s—I don’t always know what—”

“ _I_ know.” His fingers tighten on Shiro’s arm, and he moves his other hand up, onto the side of Shiro’s neck, until he can feel Shiro’s pulse galloping against his palm. “You won’t do anything,” he says. “I won’t let you.” It’s better than _You won’t hurt me_ , because Shiro wouldn’t hear it, and it’s not real enough. Shiro could ruin him completely by accident. That’s the price of the dare.

Keith can feel it everywhere when Shiro shudders, feels it even more in some kind of nonphysical, feverish place he has no control over, where his voice is crouched over on itself like a beggar, saying, _Don’t give me any better reasons not to want it_.

Shiro’s hands stay wide-splayed on Keith’s hips even when Keith moves in again, driving higher up onto his knees, his chest hitting Shiro’s. He kisses Keith like it’s something he was planning to keep, just on the off chance he could give it back, with no actual expectations at all, shuddering again when a low sound cracks out of Keith’s throat.

A flicker of green light close by makes them both turn, ducking apart. Keith’s already halfway to drawing his bayard as Shiro rolls back onto his haunches, getting ready to stand.

A few feet away, glowing specks are lifting out of the grass, turning in lazy circles. More and more of them appear, getting slightly brighter as they rise, hovering in midair. Keith squints at the ground around them, making out the little pods that were riding on the breeze, all of them peeling open, luminous green pinpricks wafting up from inside.

“Huh,” Keith says, watching a few of the lights spin obliviously by him, raising his hand under them. Their soft green glints subtly change the shape of Shiro’s face as they pass, softer here, sharper there, making Keith think of finding him sat inside that holographic map.

Hundreds of the lights appear all across the field, like green stars coming out, clusters of them all moving around each other. They light up everything, almost brighter than the sunset was, bobbing in waves towards the trees before they start to fan out between the trunks and disappear out of sight.

“Wow,” Shiro says, watching the slow migration, a few specks weaving between them. He looks at Keith and shrugs, returns the smile Keith gives him, both of them shaded in the green shine that’s taken over the air.

“Yeah,” Keith says, still smiling as he turns his head back and forth, following the shimmering clouds.

“We’ll have to come back here with the others someday,” Shiro says, looking up, a half-crown of the lights swirling over his head.

Keith manages not to wince, to keep some of his expression the same, but Shiro sees it anyway. “Don’t apologise,” Keith tells him, pointing when Shiro opens his mouth. He sits back on the ground, giving up on tracking the last few living glows that haven’t made it out to the edge of the field yet. “You’ve already hit your quota.”

“Okay,” Shiro sighs, sitting by Keith, jostling him with a shoulder.

It’s gone back to being dark, but when Keith turns his head he can still see Shiro’s eyes, the hard line of his jaw, enough of the soft shape of his mouth to remind him how bruised his own lips feel. He lies back, stretching out flat, taking Shiro with him by the arm. The grass stands up around them, earth against their backs like completing a circuit.

“What if they didn’t make it?” He doesn’t know he’s going to ask until he already has, doesn’t know if he wants Shiro to answer.

Shiro rolls onto his side, puts a hand on Keith’s chest, his face silhouetted against the sky and the nearer trees. “They made it.”

After a second Keith asks, “What if we don’t find them?”

The hand on his chest turns into an arm across him as Shiro lies back down, still mostly on his side, leaning partly on Keith’s. “We’ll find them.”

Weighing it in his mouth for a moment, Keith says, “What if it takes years?”

Shiro’s quiet at that, maybe thinking, maybe building himself up against the idea. Maybe he’s just never thought about it, never let himself. Keith can hear the deep breath he takes, then the second, feels the release of it scatter on his neck. He turns closer to Shiro’s side.

Finally Shiro says, “They’ll forgive us.” He says it in that way where it’s easier to believe than not.

Reaching across himself, Keith mirrors the arm Shiro’s put over him, lets his head duck down close to Shiro’s shoulder. He huffs a laugh when Shiro touches a kiss to the top of his head, lifts it to knocks his forehead against the armour it’s resting on, closing his eyes and trying not to think.

He wakes up when Shiro rolls sharply into him on his way out of a nightmare.

“Sorry. It’s okay,” Shiro says groggily, sitting up, off to one side with his back to Keith, still breathing hard. “S’just me.”

“Who else,” Keith mumbles, lowering his head to the cool ground, jaw creaking on a yawn. Blindly, he finds Shiro’s wrist and brings him back down with a tug, until Shiro’s at right angles to him, head resting on Keith’s stomach.

He keeps hold of Shiro’s wrist – the metal’s never as cold as he expects it to be. It’s a new moon and the sky’s mostly cleared, stars playing themselves out all across it.

“Wanna tell me about it?” he asks.

“It’s only what you’d expect,” Shiro sighs, but then he says, “I was being taken down this corridor, one that led to the arena. I didn’t want to go back, so I tried to fight them. I thought—thought maybe if I made enough trouble they’d just...”

Keith’s fingers curl tight again. “I’m glad they didn’t.”

Shiro turns his head so he’s looking up, cheek on Keith’s chest like he can hear Keith’s heartbeat through the armour. “There was this sound, like wind blowing. It got louder the closer we got, until you could see the crowd, rows of people going on and on. They were all shouting, or singing, maybe. For me. I didn’t want to, but...”

“It’s not your fault, Shiro,” Keith tells him. “You didn’t have a choice.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, tipping his face up to the sky again. “Yeah, I did. I chose to live.”

“Don’t expect me to blame you,” Keith says. His free hand combs through Shiro’s hair, knuckles brushing his forehead.

“I wanted to survive,” Shiro says quietly. “So I turned into what I hated, or so close I couldn’t tell the difference.”

Fingers pausing against Shiro’s temple, Keith says, “And I almost turned into nothing at all. Neither of us are the same, Shiro. We can’t go back now. But it doesn’t matter. We’re still here.”

He’s almost dozing off again when Shiro asks, “Which way d’you think Earth is?”

Eyes still closed, Keith lifts both their arms and points. “Up,” he says, smirking when Shiro laughs.

“Fair enough,” Shiro says, drawing their arms down and across his chest. Keith traces the smooth lines in the alloy of Shiro’s fingers, up the back of his hand and down again.

“You know I can feel that, right?” Shiro asks.

“Yeah,” Keith says, not stopping.

Slowly, Shiro moves his arm up, fingers knitting with Keith’s. He turns their hands to kiss Keith’s wrist, the side of his palm, two of his knuckles, breath fogging warmly over Keith’s skin. He touches Shiro’s mouth, follows his lips to their corners, then the shape of his chin, down to the jut of his Adam’s apple.

Shiro’s voice buzzes though Keith’s fingertips when he says, “Still sure?”

Keith’s thumb slides to the hinge of Shiro’s jaw, fingers folded against Shiro’s cheek with Shiro’s still loosely caught between them. “I’m sure,” he says, not even minding the question. “You don’t scare me.”

“Good,” Shiro says under his breath, and Keith can feel that too.

-|-

They head for the stream late into the morning, eating while they walk, staying close as they pass through the underbrush. Sunlight breaks through the tree canopy and ducks around heavy clouds that keep threatening rain.

Keith’s spent the couple of hours since they woke up falling in and out of a mental loop, waiting for Shiro to change his mind, then going back to believing it won’t happen. He strays up against Shiro’s side, and Shiro’s hand finds the middle of his back like a reflex. Shiro steps in close as they edge around what looks like a giant Venus flytrap with curled, bonelike teeth, and Keith fingers wrap around Shiro’s upper arm to pull him back. When Keith catches his gaze, there’s a settled look to Shiro’s smile, to the way it reaches all the way to his eyes.

They’re both sweating by the time they can pick out the silvery noise of the water, the greenhouse heat and humidity getting to them even with their suits working to regulate it. Eventually the trees and thick undergrowth give way, opening on the bank like a curtain pulling back.

It’s a wide and glassy-clear stream, not that fast. To his right, Keith can see the water tripping down over low, flat ridges of rock, flowing slower as it pours into a bed of small stones and soft, stringy plants. Tall, wide trees with bark that’s almost black lean in overhead, patches of sky showing between the pale fronded leaves wider than Keith’s body that turn slowly in the breeze. The banks are framed with rushes and hundreds of small flowers, petals blue and black at the edges. Everything smells of clean, living damp.

“Nice,” Keith says, dropping his helmet on a moss-carpeted rock, stuffing his gloves into his belt, sighing as he pushes back his damp hair. Something high above him in the branches trills an answer in a double-throated voice, and he peers up, eyes scanning from tree to tree.

Picking his way to the water’s edge, Shiro crouches, his fingers making ripples across the surface. “No fish here,” he says. “We’d probably have to go further downstream for that.”

“Towards the village,” Keith points out. “D’you even know how to fish?”

“I’ve fished,” Shiro says, looking at Keith over his shoulder. “Once. I think.”

Keith snorts. “Yeah, okay. We can manage without fish, and without letting some unsuspecting village full of prehistoric-level aliens know we’re here.”

Shiro rolls his eyes, smiling, and Keith steps over, hand swinging out and landing high on Shiro’s shoulder, almost accidental before his fingers touch Shiro’s neck. Shiro watches him, one side of his mouth still tilted as Keith passes him and wades into the water.

At its deepest, the stream still only reaches halfway to Keith’s knees, and it’s chilly when he runs his hand through it. He bends to scoop handfuls over his neck, slicking his hair back from his face. Their armour keeps them pretty clean, but Keith didn’t realise how much he’d missed real water, water that hasn’t been through the Altean recycler tech in their suits and their Lions a million times over, water that tastes rich and earthy as he wets his face.

Keith turns when he hears Shiro walking through the plants on the bank, but the sections of Shiro’s armour unclasp without much sound at all. He stays standing at the water’s edge, leaning away to drop the chest piece to one side, pulling the gauntlets free of his arms.

“Risky,” Keith says, unconvincing, hands paused in midair.

Shiro shrugs, setting his belt, greaves and boots on the pile, until he’s standing in just the suit’s dark grey underlayer. “We’re pretty isolated here. And I think it’s safe to say the Galra don’t know about this place.”

“Yet,” Keith points out.

“Yet,” Shiro concedes, exasperated. He reaches behind him, tapping the weird rounded seam releases that Alteans apparently used instead of zippers or catches. Shiro tugs the fabric down until he’s naked to the waist, letting out a loud sigh of relief Keith can see in his shoulders.

Throat working, Keith gathers up more water, gets rid of yesterday’s dirt from under his nails, still not really seeing anything except Shiro in the corner of his eye.

Shiro splashes water up his arms, over his chest, roughly rubs his hands through his hair and down his face. Giving in, nothing else to do, Keith paces to the opposite bank and pulls quickly out of the topmost parts of his armour, rolling the sleeves of the underlayer around his upper arms. He piles it all on another big stone, takes his time turning around again.

“You still need a shave,” he says, since it’s still not enough, Shiro straightening and finding him watching, water running down his stomach.

Keith offers the knife from his belt again, but Shiro waves him off. The water draws bright lines over his sides, down his chest to his hips, not wetting the underlayer’s material at all, like it’s meeting a coat of oil.

Shiro’s a catalogue of scars, most of them thin slashes and simple streaks like the one across his nose, but some of them are wider and more uneven, closer to burns. The metal of his prosthetic gleams where the sun hits the water. Keith’s fingers curl around the knife.

“No mirror. But you can take care of it if you want,” Shiro says then, kicking up water until he’s close enough Keith has to look up and he can see the drops falling from Shiro’s hair, the beads still clinging in his eyelashes. “What?” he says to Keith’s doubting look. “I trust you.”

It shouldn’t do what it does to him, but Keith doesn’t get a say.

“Sit down,” he says, swallowing, gesturing at a rock sticking out of a shallower side of the streambed, forcing an irregular breath when Shiro turns his back. More scars there too, laid down over muscle, etched across the arch of a shoulder blade, one of them raised and white and curved right at the top of his spine.

Shiro sits, leaning forward a little to palm more water over his face, his neck, shivering when it runs down between his shoulders, head bowed like waiting for a crown. With his skin catching the light, nothing dividing his body from the air, Shiro looks insanely vulnerable. Keith has to drag his stare from the nape of Shiro’s neck, heart lurching when he remembers the sleep-warm feel of it, more vulnerability, his stomach tight like he’s looking at something helpless curled up in a ring of thorns.

Coming around the rock, Keith crouches in front of Shiro, eyes skipping off Shiro’s when he lifts his face. Keith can see the wound he dressed, what feels like years ago now, still red at the edges.

“It’s not healing like it should,” he says, stopping himself just short of touching it.

“Not everything does,” Shiro says, water reluctantly trickling from his chin, cutting across the scar on his face as it rolls down his nose, puddling in the hollow above his collarbone before cresting over.

Keith’s free hand tilts Shiro’s face up, thumb slipping under his jaw. It’s an easy shift of his weight to bring himself closer, enough to kiss the bow of Shiro’s bottom lip, artless and over in a heartbeat. He leans back, feeling too exposed, his skin too tight, his breathing too awkward. The smile rebuilds at the side of Shiro’s mouth, more careful, collecting like the water.

The knife’s probably sharp enough to work fine without it, but Keith takes the gel from the first aid kit out of his belt. He smoothes it onto Shiro’s skin while Shiro sits, patient and pliable, hands loose between his knees like he’s got no guard, no hidden pieces, like he doesn’t have time inside him he’s barely touched.

They’ve stumbled into a connected space out of rooms Keith wasn’t convinced even had doors. He feels like he’s been handed something breakable, crushable, all spun glass and dry petals. He’s not sure he was made for this.

Keith cups Shiro’s chin and turns his head, raising the knife slowly to make sure Shiro sees it coming. The smile is still there, or at least the print it left behind.

“It’s okay,” Shiro says when Keith pauses, almost whispering. His hand rests on Keith’s knee, grips tight once, and Keith manages to salvage a breath.

The blade touches Shiro’s neck, just barely pressing down, sliding over his throat.

Keith’s hand is the only steady thing about him.

The air sinks to the bottom of his lungs, thicker than the water, boiling in the warmth of Shiro close up, saliva filling his mouth even when he swallows. Keith watches a vein fluttering under Shiro’s skin, the flush that reaches his cheeks under the knife, the twitch of his lashes. He thinks he might be swaying with his heartbeat, turning Shiro’s face the other way, his fingers on Shiro’s neck. He gets a quick there-and-gone-again flash of Shiro back in that base, drugged and restrained and impossible.

The knife sends light angling up across Shiro’s brow, flashing like sun off snow in the white of his hair. Keith only really breathes when he pauses to wash the blade in the stream, emptying out a palmful of water over Shiro’s skin to wash away the stubble and the gel. It’s like performing a rite, all stupid, slapdash tenderness. A tiny bead of blood wells up low on Shiro’s throat, clinging next to the tendon, and Keith catches it with a thumb, rubs it away between his fingers.

“Almost done,” he says eventually, jarred by how much space his voice takes up even with the noise of the stream, the trees rustling, the avalanche of his pulse.

His free hand curls around Shiro’s bare shoulder, the heat of the skin like a splinter in his palm. When he glances up, Shiro’s eyes are closed and he’s breathing slowly, face relaxed. Way too trusting, making Keith feel badly-stitched, afraid to move too much or inhale too deeply.

There’s a threshold or a border he can’t see past, drawn somewhere between the calm expand-contract of Shiro’s ribs and the frantic way Keith’s blood is running in every direction at once like something trapped in a burning house. The _need_ in Keith to cross it anyway is eating him alive, the urge to just scuff it out, trespass until all of it wears his footprints.

One last swipe of the blade by Shiro’s ear, and then he’s finished, looking at Shiro with his chest on fire and a knife in his hand as Shiro slowly blinks his eyes open. Whatever’s unwinding itself in him, Keith thinks it’s stuck that way.

“Thanks,” Shiro says. He touches his face, runs a hand back through his hair. “You mind doing this too?” he asks, pointing to the sides of his head where the hair’s grown out. “Doesn’t really feel right otherwise.”

“I should be charging you for this,” Keith tells him, but he stands, a little stiff, knees complaining.

“Even if I could pay you, what would you spend it on?” Shiro says as Keith moves around him.

“I’d think of something,” Keith says. “Like an electric razor. Lean over again.”

More water runs from Keith’s hands across Shiro’s head, trailing down into the dip of his spine. Shiro gives another shiver, but he angles his head back against Keith’s palm when Keith’s fingers start brushing through his hair. Keith steps a little closer, hand falling onto Shiro’s shoulder, balancing them both.

His palm skids on wet skin, following up the curve of Shiro’s neck, over until his fingertips are pressing at Shiro’s collarbone. He starts shortening the hair on one side, working around the back, then the opposite side, starting again closer to Shiro’s scalp, until he’s shaved it down to more or less its usual short buzz. He touches Shiro’s arm to let him know he’s finished, feels the muscle twitch where it meets the prosthetic, how Shiro quickly picks apart the automatic tension.

“Just me,” he says, but he takes his hand away, brushes loose hair off Shiro’s ear, washes it from the tops of his shoulders with quick sweeps of his fingers.

Keith doesn’t notice until he’s cleaning up the nape of Shiro’s neck that he’s touching the scar just below it. It’s white and curled, almost a half-circle and so, so close to Shiro’s spine that Keith can’t look away from it.

“One of my early matches,” Shiro says, not turning around. “He had this long bladed thing, almost like a sickle, but double-headed. He was bigger than I was, caught me while I was trying to duck.”

Keith thinks of questions and decides they don’t matter, thinks of other things and decides they’re not enough. He puts his hand over the scar, and it doesn’t escape his palm. “You beat him.”

Shiro puffs air out through his nose. “Yeah. Yeah, I beat him. I can’t remember his name anymore, but I beat him.”

Fingertips grazing through bristling hairs, thumb drawing small circles, Keith asks, “How’d you do it?”

Shiro lifts and drops a shoulder, muscle rolling under Keith’s hand. “I stopped ducking.”

“I’m sorry,” Keith tells him uselessly, still touching the scar like he can wipe it away. “You shouldn’t have to keep these.”

“It’s okay,” Shiro says. “They keep me honest.” He twists at the waist, holds his hand out behind him, looking up at Keith. “Here, I’ll switch with you. Yours is still uneven.”

Eyebrow raised, Keith gives up the knife, and Shiro stands, bracing his hands on his thighs. He comes around the rock, smiling as he feels at his shorter hair. He gestures for Keith to sit, then catches him before he can, ducking to kiss Keith on the corner of his mouth, half onto his cheek. He does it like he’s proving something to himself, reaching for a door he’s never had to find in the dark, just to make sure he can.

Keith sits, bows his head, watches the water parting against his legs, his reflection warping on the surface, getting chopped up by reflected sunlight.

After a minute he closes his eyes and lets Shiro move around him, tracking him by the splashes he makes and the way his shadow plays over Keith’s lids. The skin tingles all down his spine when Shiro’s fingers lift the hair from his neck or brush it back from his temples, measuring out the ends. He drifts in the faint whisper of the blade through his hair, the careful rhythmic tugs and Shiro’s small, considering noises when he stands still next to Keith or behind him.

“You about done?” Keith asks eventually, not really wanting to talk or open his eyes, holding off as long as he can to avoid shoving the moment onto another track, into a different shape.

Shiro’s fingers keep tracing a line across the back of Keith’s neck, almost under the collar of his suit’s underlayer. “I was done a couple minutes ago,” he admits, laughing when Keith swings a hand at him, avoiding the hit by catching Keith’s wrist and dropping the knife into his palm. He steps close again when Keith stands up, tucking the hair out of Keith’s face more carefully than he needs to. “There you are.”

Keith tilts his head until the hair falls slightly into his eyes again. “Here I am,” he says, smirking when Shiro’s mouth twitches, rolling his eyes.

It’s so easy to cross into Shiro’s space, nearly up against his chest, almost as easy to bring Shiro’s head down with a hand on his neck. He’s already put a knife there. It’s harder to forget where they are, what they still have to do, or to know if he should even want to. Mostly, Keith wants to think he can have this without conditions, even if he can’t forget that nothing comes without conditions, that it’s all hanging like a bunch of model planes from wires of _If_ and _Until_ and _Maybe_.

Shiro’s body brackets him, curves against him, arms around Keith’s waist, kissing him while the stream braids between their legs. He lets Keith in, opens his mouth wider when Keith’s tongue pries at the corner of his lips, his thigh sidling against Keith’s. Every time Shiro gives up a little more, the thrill hits like a hammer, like every dizzying, lung-emptying descent Keith’s ever pulled off just to spite the ground.

A bleeping alarm from both their helmets on opposite banks snaps them out of it, and Shiro groans, nudges his forehead to Keith’s before he steps back. “We’re about to have company.”

“But the nearest village is miles away,” Keith mocks, already going for his armour.

“Yeah, yeah, you were right,” Shiro mutters, waving a hand. “You happy now?”

“What, I don’t look happy?” Keith says, yanking the sleeves of his suit down, feeling it pull the water from his skin as he tugs his gauntlets back on.

“You look kissed,” Shiro says, and Keith’s fingers fumble on the catches of his chest piece.

“Look who’s talking,” he shoots back, too late.

Shiro’s not trying to hide the smirk as Keith pushes back through the water. “Didn’t say it was a bad look.” He laughs when Keith checks him with a shoulder.

They’re heading back to the field and their Lions before the indicators on their helmet visors reach the stream, small diamond-shaped markers tracking eight of the locals. Turning before the trees get too dense to see through, they get a look at a group of greyish, stocky people wearing black furs, long wooden poles propped on their shoulders as they walk. The last two of them are swinging a smaller one between them, and piping laughter reaches Keith and Shiro as they walk away.

“We’re gonna need to fly low getting out of here if we don’t want them seeing us,” Keith points out as they break out of the brush again, stopping when Shiro does.

Shiro looks off towards the Lions, frown on his face and the sun behind him, just starting to sink into a purpling sky, blending light into his edges. “We could wait until after dark.”

“That’ll be hours,” Keith says. “We’ve already been here two days.”

“I know,” Shiro says, turning to him. “But there’s one more thing I want to take care of before we head back out there.” When Keith gives him a blank look, Shiro nods at the Red Lion. “C’mon.”

“For what?” Keith finally asks, suspicion lurking on the margins of it.

Shiro just starts walking backwards in Red’s direction, so he’s facing Keith when he lifts his hands from his sides and says, “Trust me.”

“Is that all?” Keith says, but he only stays rooted for a second before his feet start to move again.

Shiro keeps himself turned Keith’s way until Keith catches up, bumps his hip into Keith’s as he turns.

“What, more sparring?” Keith asks as they get closer, instantly wishing he hadn’t, even with everything they’ve stacked up between now and that beach, all the distance they’ve left.

“Not this time,” Shiro says, waiting for Keith to open the hatch, the ramp coming down. “Not exactly, anyway.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Seriously?” Keith asks, hands tapping on the sides of his seat. “You really wanna do this now?”

Shiro leans forward, balanced on the edge of the console with his arms braced either side of him. “I think it’s a good idea, don’t you? Before we get into another shooting war?”

“So you do it,” Keith tells him, crossing his arms, uncrossing them, drumming his fingers on the chair again. “Go and commune with your Lion to your heart’s content, don’t let me stop you.”

“Keith,” Shiro sighs. “I know you’ve been having trouble with—”

“I’ve got it under control,” Keith breaks in, jaw tightening up. He hates trying to out-glare Shiro. It’s like having a staring contest with a mountain: it does shift eventually, but on a way more impressive timescale than yours.

“This worked pretty well the last time,” Shiro reminds him.

“When we were trying to form Voltron,” Keith says. “When it was all of us doing it. And not _that_ well, Shiro, let’s be honest.”

“Keith, c’mon, let me help,” Shiro asks him. “I know you want to handle it all on your own, and I’m sure you could if you really tried.” Reaching out, he catches Keith’s right hand in his left, stopping the tapping of his fingers. “But the thing is, you’re not on your own.” His knee nudges Keith’s. “You help me, I help you. We look out for each other. That’s how this works. It’s the only way it’s gonna work.”

“Right. Because we’re a team,” Keith rattles off by rote, doing a lousy impression of every speech he’s heard Shiro give.

“Because we care about each other,” Shiro says. “More than we should, maybe, but... I can’t look at you and not want to make things better. So please don’t ask me to.”

It kills whatever comeback Keith was about to try, takes his voice out at the ankles, no effort even needed.

“I’m not ordering,” Shiro tells him. “I’m offering.”

Keith glances off to the side, sighing sharply. Shiro’s fingers curl into his palm. In his head, the tamped-down flare and snarl of his Lion gets a little harder to ignore.

“Keith,” Shiro says quietly, “we’re all we’ve got out here.”

He meets Shiro’s look, turns his hand until he can fold it around Shiro’s fingers. “It’s enough,” he says, trying to fill the space with it, trying to make what should be old and known by now at least not sound new and untested. It shouldn’t take this much to make him say it. “Really, Shiro. It is.” If he looks up far enough he’ll see the wires again, _Until_ and _For now_. “Fine,” he says, long-suffering. “I’ll do it.”

With his eyes closed and his hands in his lap, Keith focuses on letting everything go except the tether to his Lion, clearing his head like sawing through a rope, until there’s just one strand left at the core, leading down and deeper. Shiro stays where he is, quietly talking Keith through it, voice pitched low while he encourages Keith to concentrate, the sound of him steady like an anchor.

Losing the distractions, Keith feels lighter, expanding into the place where his awareness becomes Red’s, like a river joining an ocean, starving the way fire starves, unruly and always. He tries to take hold of it, change the shape of it, but it’s like squeezing his fingers around a burning coal. It thrashes out of his grip as he tenses up, a tremor starting in his muscles.

“Easy,” he hears Shiro say. “Work _with_ it, not against it. Remember: it’s a part of you. You need each other, even if you don’t always want the same thing.”

“It’s too much,” Keith grits though his teeth. “It’s stronger than I am.”

“No,” Shiro says, and Keith distantly notices the hand gripping his shoulder, his body attached to him at the wrong end of a telescope. “It’s just strong in a different way. Find the balance, the quiet edge where the two of you can do anything.”

Frowning, Keith unknots his shoulders, relaxes his hands and tries to breathe deeply again. He blurs into Red, senses flinging outward until he can feel the air and life on the planet, its hurtling path around the sun, the sun’s swinging course through the galaxy. If he pushes he can even feel the heady, racing ever-motion of space itself, expanding on and on into its own forever, the first, purest kind of flight.

 _Where are the rest of you?_ Keith thinks, because he can feel that too, the missing notes, the empty places, aloneness where it shouldn’t be. _We need them too. Where are they?_

The question sinks underneath the crashing beat of energy and impulses, like standing in a giant’s heart. In his head, Keith gets a reel of landscapes, planets, angles of the galaxy’s spiralling disc. Vision sliding like oil over water, Keith can see trees in mist and the bottom of oceans, craggy mountains and skies crawling with rain.

He sees a white city that covers continents, stretches through the clouds and curves past the horizon. He hears a painful, raging non-sound as clawing shadows spread through the city like a disease, then out from world to world across the stars. He gets knocked back, losing his breath to a _hate_ that’s his and not his, a need to rip into the shadow until there’s nothing left.

“Not too far, Keith,” Shiro says from somewhere down a tunnel or the top of a well Keith’s been dropped in. “You have to stay you.”

It echoes, and the echoes curve and flow together until they make a path to the Black Lion, the strength of it like a wall, a stone that parts the river, proud and steady. The path wraps around again to Shiro like the inevitable, expected turn that leads back home, and there’s the same feeling, a fact of something enduring, enough to trust, a _lasting_.

 _Which one of us is feeling that?_ Keith asks, but it’s a whisper in a hurricane. There’s no finding that separation now anyway.

He drives his way up, sweat trickling down his face as his armour tries to compensate. Keith can follow the looping, luminous strands from his armour to his bayard, both twining around each other and wrapping up in his Lion, along with the strands that pass through him and curve back, back through time and into ranks of other Red Paladins.

Their faces scroll past him, and Keith doesn’t know their names, where they came from – he thinks most of them are Altean, but there are other species he doesn’t recognise. They all _feel_ the same underneath, like memories he hasn’t made yet, or a song from back in childhood. He almost _knows_ them: their anger and their love and the way those are two sides of the same thing, the wind-stripped feeling of always standing just outside the centre, never trusting being trapped on the ground.

There’s a goading push from Red, challenging Keith to face himself, understand himself, to prove himself the way he did when he chose an airlock over letting the Galra take him, take _his_ Lion, the moment he picked the plunge over the chains. He thinks he can feel why Red accepted him then, the way his Lion isn’t like the others. He has to keep earning it, every choice he makes, no running from it. From himself.

No pity, or patience, or promises. No second chances from the fire.

 _Stay worthy_ , is the dare, like a brand, the fight that never ends. _If you can_.

“I get it now,” he says under his breath, small smile on his lips, body buzzing with it. Standing on that silent edge that’s not really an edge, just the crest before the dive, the stillness where he can tip the world in any direction. Where they can do anything. Almost anything.

 _Maybe we can’t put it all back_ , he thinks, Red’s strength settling under all his skin again, the ground such a small thing with no hold on him. _But we can take it away from them. We can make them sorry._

Power answers him, wordless and deafening, down to his bones: _Paladin_.

“Get what?” Shiro asks softly, sounding like he already knows.

Keith’s smile bends sharper. He opens his eyes, Shiro’s expectant look waiting for him. The headache’s gone. “Why it has to be me.”

A little nudge of a thought is all it takes, and his Lion springs forwards, darts around Shiro’s, barely touching down before leaping off again, circling the Black Lion before they stop, giving off a deep contented pulse that ripples out through the field.

A faint pull on Shiro’s wrist, and Shiro ducks his head to meet Keith’s mouth when he stands, Keith laughing just to laugh, just to fold the laugh between Shiro’s lips, not a secret, just something that doesn’t need saying.

“Thank you,” he says anyway, blots it into the skin of Shiro’s cheek.

Shiro’s hands frame his waist, reddened mouth curving up. “I didn’t do anything.”

_You were here._

Keith just shakes his head, watches Shiro’s smile crease the skin around his eyes. He puts a hand on Shiro’s side, the other flat on his chest. He looks at his fingers spread out over Shiro’s sternum, presses his palm down until Shiro lets himself fall back against the console again, Keith following him into the space between his feet.

“What do you want?” Keith asks him, almost, nearly careless, gut tightening up. Maybe it’s not a fair question, but it’s honest.

“Keith,” Shiro starts, scratchy. “You already—”

“You should tell me,” Keith says. He can’t get any closer with them both in armour.

Shiro swallows, eyes rifling through Keith’s expression, lashes flitting against his cheeks while Keith just stares back, not thinking anything, not even really waiting. It’s all right there already, understanding that’s more reliable than trust, more alive than safety. Now it’s finally just about what they do with it.

“This,” Shiro says, palms fitted tight above Keith’s belt, legs either side of Keith’s. “I want this. To stay like this, for as long as I can.” He moves then, quick and uncoordinated, like he can’t help himself. Whatever space was left between them crumples when Shiro’s chest hits Keith’s, driving a breath out of them both.

Keith still hasn’t got the air back before Shiro’s kissing him, clutching at him, made of a thousand rattling, stretched-tight pieces all racing to the same thing. His fingers dig in against Shiro’s chest as Shiro nips at his jaw. His other hand scratches up the back of Shiro’s neck, tugs him into another kiss, drowning-deep, Shiro’s arms clenching tighter around him.

They almost trip when the backs of Keith’s legs meet the pilot’s seat, his knees knocking Shiro’s as they swerve around it.

Shiro’s laughing when they get themselves upright again, leaning his forehead against Keith’s. “This might not be the best place,” he says, holding Keith steady by the shoulders, crouching a little against the slope of the cockpit. He’s not trying to step away.

Keith licks over his lips where they’re almost numb, swollen-hot. Arm reaching past Shiro, brushing up against him, Keith hits a control and nods at the hatch as it opens. He hooks his arm across Shiro’s side instead of taking it back.

“There’s a better one down that way,” he says, a take-it-or-leave-it kind of tone, a do-anything-but-leave-it kind of tripping in his chest. The way Shiro’s watching him now should be leaving tracks, nicks Keith could feel under his fingers and think _heal or scar?_ like it’s a matter of choices, or goals, or whether he actually wants to be unmarked at the end of it.

“Yeah,” Shiro says hoarsely, left hand leaving Keith’s shoulder to touch his cheek. “Yeah, Keith, I’d—”

The rest of it catches, smashed into debris in his throat when Keith turns his head and Shiro’s fingers fall to the corner of his mouth, slip half across his bottom lip, sliding easy where they’re still wet. Keith breathes, and he can see the reaction travel all up Shiro’s arm, into the twitch of his lids and how his mouth parts like sympathy or something less thought-out.

“C’mon,” Keith says, half against Shiro’s fingers. He catches Shiro’s hand in his, draws it down, taking a small step and making for the hatch, facing back at Shiro. “Unless you’re gonna change your mind again?”

Shiro slants him a look, gripping down on Keith’s hand when Keith smirks. He takes over their momentum from Keith, passing him with a slow, deliberate nudge of his shoulder, his chest, leading them out of the cockpit. The corridor’s too narrow for it, but they stay side by side anyway.

-|-

It all feels slower and less desperate than Keith would’ve guessed, if he’d ever had enough nerve to really think about it, if there’d ever been enough of a point besides making him tired of himself until he needed to go out and hit something.

The lights are low over the bunk, their armour forming a loose pile on the floor. The process of getting out of it keeps dragging on because they’re standing too close, too distracted to think the release commands clearly enough, and because they keep swaying together until Keith can put his mouth on Shiro’s neck or Shiro can run his fingers up into Keith’s hair and _pull_ , still kissing him.

Shiro lifts Keith’s chest piece free, hands wrapping phantom heat in bands around Keith’s ribs every time they touch him. Keith catches Shiro’s right arm at the elbow and frees the armour slowly, one plate at a time, peeling it away to the metal of his prosthetic underneath.

Eyes on Keith’s fingers as they slide along his forearm, Shiro asks, “Why doesn’t it bother you?”

“Why should it?” Keith frowns, watching Shiro’s face, the tension at the corners of his mouth.

Shiro lifts his shoulder, turning the arm in Keith’s grip, a faint droning noise sounding as it moves. “It’s Galra.”

“It’s yours,” Keith says, thumb sliding into the hollow of Shiro’s elbow. “I don’t care where it came from, Shiro. It’s yours now.”

“Doesn’t always feel that way,” Shiro mutters. He shakes his head when Keith opens his mouth to speak, following Keith down into another kiss, and whatever Keith might have said breaks up against Shiro’s tongue, washes away on Shiro’s breath. _You couldn’t ever be a stranger_.

He presses as close as he can, his chest tight to Shiro’s with just fabric between them, air that’s too thin, history with their fingerprint smudges all over it.

Keith’s hands slide up Shiro’s back, fingers finding the small ovals that make the underlayer part down invisible seams. Shiro holds still with his cheek to Keith’s, his gusting little breaths trailing over Keith’s neck. There’s bare skin in a V from Shiro’s shoulders to the middle of his back now, the fabric starting to slide down his arms, and Keith spreads out his hand there, over muscle and smooth skin, the rougher texture of a scar.

“It’s all the same,” Keith says under his breath. “It’s all just you.” He says it again, and Shiro shudders into his palm.

Keith watches while Shiro steps back, his hands quickly finding the rest of the releases by memory. His armour’s underlayer folds away from his skin, separating into two parts around his waist that he lets drop to the floor. Shiro stands there for a second, naked and mostly hard, his chest rising and falling, throat bobbing and hands flexing, so perfectly _real_ it hurts to look at him.

Shiro jerks into motion again when Keith starts to copy him, reaching behind himself with clumsy fingers, stopping when Shiro gives him a look from under his lashes, hands lifting, moving Keith’s out of the way.

“I had it,” he says without any real bite while Shiro taps at the top of his spine. Shivers follow the opening seams and the touch of air against his skin, his back suddenly chilled, all the warmth of Shiro’s body at his front.

“I know,” Shiro murmurs, dragging the top half of the underlayer from Keith’s arms with a soft tug and sending it to the floor. His chest meets Keith’s every time either of them inhales deep enough, and the rhythm of Keith’s breathing starts to revolve around it, like something tidal. “I just wanted to.”

He can’t help the rough, bitten-off sound he makes, starts pulling at the fabric around his waist, little shudders ratcheting through his shoulders when Shiro traces his sides with his fingertips, knuckles brushing down Keith’s stomach.

The air is all liquid heat that he can almost taste, his ears flooded by the dull thunder of his pulse, head full of lurching wants that go right to his gut. Putting his hands on Shiro, finding all the places that wreck his silence. Dropping to his knees and staying there while Shiro presses him hard into the edge of the bunk. Shiro above him, under him, his weight holding Keith down or giving him something to push against. He swallows, wet, takes a shaky step closer.

Having Shiro tight up against him from shoulders to thighs robs the air out of Keith’s lungs, their hands suddenly allowed to go anywhere, Shiro groaning low when Keith rocks his hips forwards. He lets Shiro direct them back, the bunk’s edge meeting the insides of his knees, falling onto it and pushing towards the wall. Shiro follows him, until Keith’s halfway on his back with Shiro braced over him on his right arm, muscle flexing where it meets metal.

Keith’s hands trace up Shiro’s back, fingers tight on Shiro’s shoulders every time he rolls his weight down into Keith’s, sliding hard up against him, both of them leaking, precome making it easier and slicker every time. Shiro kisses along his shoulder, teeth nipping his skin when Keith slides a hand down over the curve of Shiro’s ass, fingers spreading him a little before running back up his spine.

Shiro’s free hand scratches lightly down Keith’s side, making him arch, then moving him up into the slow pace Shiro’s setting. Shiro holds him there, working Keith off against his belly, dick rubbing into the hollow of Keith’s hipbone. Keith turns his face into Shiro’s neck, panting open-mouthed, his heels digging into the cushion when he tries to chase the pressure, sweat making his skin skid against Shiro’s.

“Like this?” Shiro asks, hot by his ear, slick marking Keith’s stomach.

There’s no way Keith can answer, but he manages to shove them over and turn them, rolling until he’s kneeling either side of Shiro’s hips. He clenches his hands on Shiro’s shoulders, Shiro looking up at him, eyes nearly black and his face flushed dark. Keith watches Shiro fight to keep his eyes open when Keith wraps a hand around him, thumb sliding in wetness across the slit, under the head, circling there slower when it makes Shiro _whine_.

Hips twitching into nothing, dick curved up tight to his belly, Keith fixes his eyes on Shiro’s face while he twists his wrist, tightens his grip. He keeps it slow and light enough that Shiro can’t help bucking up, chest hitching and his hair stuck to his forehead, sweat running off his temple, glassy-eyed when he blinks up at Keith.

“I’m gonna watch,” Keith tells him, palm slipping loudly through precome, over burning skin. “I’m gonna be right here watching when I make you come.”

Shiro groans, his whole body shivering as he tries to fuck into Keith’s fist. His hands spasm up Keith’s thighs or curl into the cushion, every muscle in his chest and stomach shaking-tense when he bows up.

Keith bends closer to him, hand slowing, his free fingers playing over Shiro’s ribs, scratching through the dark hair below his navel, up and across a flat hard nipple. He feels the heavy drop of Shiro’s throat when he touches his neck, the quaking in his voice as he says Keith’s name.

It’d be so easy to lean down the rest of the way, rub off against Shiro’s chest, and he wants to watch that too – his come marking up Shiro’s skin, belly to collarbones, shining in the hollow between them, wants to rub it in. But Shiro’s face is slack and fever-hot, his hands struggling from Keith’s thighs to his hips, up to his sides, never settling, and Keith needs to _see it_. Shiro feels too good under him to focus on anything else, his dick thick and twitching in Keith’s hand, spread out with his control crumbling, turning solid as smoke.

“Keith,” Shiro says again, cracked, chewing at his lips, the heel of his hand thudding on the bunk when Keith squeezes and slacks off his grip again. Keith’s other hand is propped against Shiro’s sternum to feel the heavy knocking underneath, the tremors living inside Shiro’s skin. He’s not sure he’s ever felt this powerful in his life.

“Yeah,” he says, starts working his hand faster, the wet sound of Shiro’s dick slicking against his palm getting louder. “Yeah, you can.” He crooks his fingers over the head, against Shiro’s slit on the upstroke, turning his wrist sharper. “C’mon. Show me.”

Shiro makes almost no noise when he comes. He goes rigid, frozen with his back bent up off the bunk, his thighs bunching under Keith’s, almost lifting him as Shiro’s head snaps back and he spills all over Keith’s fingers, shoots across his stomach, mouth open around a strangled sound. He falls back down, shivering, body limp, still hard in Keith’s hand, fumbling to pull Keith roughly down against him, parted lips wetting Keith’s cheek, his jaw, until Shiro’s sucking at his bottom lip, pulling at his tongue. Keith can’t tell which one of them’s shaking harder.

The kiss is sloppy, spilling out of its own edges like sand being washed away. Shiro’s arms come up around him, rolling them again until Shiro’s looking down, his face level with Keith’s, flushed from his cheeks to the top of his chest, white hair hanging stringy in his eyes as he dips down to kiss Keith again. He’s ridiculously careful this time, setting off a whole other ache inside Keith’s ribs.

Shiro’s mouth presses down his neck, to his shoulder, over his chest, pausing with his forehead tipped onto Keith’s stomach. Keith sluggishly wipes his hand against the cushion before he runs it up the length of Shiro’s back, lets it rest splayed out between Shiro’s shoulders, other hand in Shiro’s hair, thumb smoothing over his temple, down to his cheek. He chokes back things he either can’t say or that Shiro already knows, or that he’s kept too long to give up without having to relearn who he is.

Shiro’s breath is a shock of heat and humming nerves where it hits the drum-tight skin over Keith’s hip, Shiro’s mouth following the fog of it across his belly, lower to mouth against his thigh, his eyes aimed up at Keith’s face the whole time. His hands keep Keith flat when he rubs his lips slowly up the side of Keith’s dick, and Keith grits his teeth against the broken noises, the words with lit fuses, until his eyes snap closed on the image of Shiro’s lips parting around the head, heat climbing up to the peak of his spine.

Clawing at the bunk under him, twitching hard into the arm Shiro’s got like a bar across his stomach, Keith can’t do anything except feel the burning, wet slide of Shiro’s mouth over him, the _pull_ of his cheeks that grabs at Keith like a fist at the small of his back. Shiro hums around him, sucking harder, and Keith feels it rebounding through his marrow.

He palms the back of Shiro’s head, the heat-flushed side of his neck, not trying to move him or take control; it’s just impossible not to touch. He can feel the tendons straining when Shiro bobs his head, hears the stone-on-stone clack of him swallowing spit and precome as his Adam’s apple rolls against Keith’s fingertips. He touches at the stretched-out corner of Shiro’s lips, rubs the pad of his thumb through the wet that’s spilling down Shiro’s chin, feeling gut-punched every time Shiro’s eyes catch his.

Keith’s thighs shake a little harder whenever Shiro sinks down, his knees trying to jerk wider apart every time Shiro’s throat constricts. His hair’s plastered to his neck, his cheek, sticking to the cushion as he lets out another low, animal noise with his head falling back, his toes curled and almost numb.

It doesn’t take long, but then again, Keith never thought he’d be here. The way Shiro’s right hand catches Keith’s left as he twists and shudders helplessly up into Shiro’s mouth cracks him open too far. There’s not enough room left in him to hide anything, but then again, he’s sick of hiding. So he gives it up the only way he knows: altogether, with a kind of well-meaning violence, eyes wide open and biting blood into his mouth. Shiro’s tongue stops his breath, curls tight to the head of Keith’s dick as the last few hard tremors untie his joints.

His chest heaves like a rescued drowning, arms too heavy when he pulls at Shiro, getting them level again so he can lick into Shiro’s mouth, run his tongue over the unreal heat of Shiro’s fucked-out lips, tasting bitter-salt. He gets Shiro’s full weight down onto him, Shiro’s hands stroking up his neck, cupping his face, pushing the hair away from his eyes like there’s something left he hasn’t seen.

Keith watches Shiro’s lashes edge his cheekbones, leaning his cheek into Shiro’s right hand, burning skin on cooler metal. Shiro’s face has this sharp, open look that’s almost hungry, not quite scared, the mottled blue-black difference between _Don’t hurt me_ and _See how I’m hurt already?_ He’s got a tacky mess smeared on his chin and tears clumping his lashes, the smile blurring on his swollen mouth.

They lie there, tangled up with no real language left except the way Keith can lean his temple into Shiro’s, how Shiro doesn’t need to pull back from him. Keith still can’t find the sense of change he was waiting for. There’s just the weak red-tinted light behind his lids, the soft quiet like everything’s under a layer of earth. There’s nothing new about either of them, just all their usual jaggedness muffled, rounded off, the air with all its ghosts shaken out. Maybe that’s peace, even if it doesn’t last. Would it still be peace if it did, or is that more like forgiveness?

Shiro keeps touching him, fingers finding where his mouth’s already been, the bruise he left high up on Keith’s chest, the spaces between Keith’s ribs, his stomach and the blade of his hip. Keith keeps his eyes closed, with only their breathing for a sound, his blood refusing to quit, surfacing everywhere Shiro’s hands go. He arcs into it when Shiro’s palm skates low across his stomach, feeling it down in his knees, hand blindly clutching Shiro’s arm, his shoulder, just to be greedy. He’s already getting hard again, chewing his lip right where it hurts.

“What do you want?” Shiro asks quietly, turning it around on him, unfair with his fingers just barely circled around Keith’s dick, holding it away from his belly, giving him nothing to work against while Keith crushes air between his teeth.

Voice burned down, eyes still shut, Keith turns his face against the bed, arms and legs trailing at the end of long ropes as he rolls over, one hand pulling Shiro with him. He gets Shiro down against him again, hard chest to the shiver of his back. When he digs a knee into the cushion and rolls his hips back, Shiro makes a punched noise and slips heavier onto him, dick catching between Keith’s thighs, riding between the cheeks of his ass when Keith’s spine arches.

Shiro’s forehead drops onto the back of Keith’s shoulder, lips apart and breath gushing out of him. One of his hands flattens Keith’s to the cushion. “We don’t—” he starts, stuttering when Keith shoves back tighter against him. “We can’t, not like—”

“You could,” Keith tells him, not caring, not stopping, face scraping along the fabric under his cheek. “I’d let you.”

He can feel Shiro’s thighs shaking against the backs of his, the jolt in his chest and shoulders getting stuck, breath struggling and pinned against Keith’s back. Keith has no idea which one of them’s really in control now, but he’s leaking onto the bed, dick hanging heavy between his legs, wet head tapping his stomach when he slides forward, tips back again, balls tight.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Shiro says, rough like he’s been peeled open and that’s what’s left in the centre.

Keith doesn’t say anything, doesn’t want to repeat himself, can’t get the words out of his throat anyway. He pulls Shiro closer any way he can, grinding back and shifting to keep Shiro right there, rubbing slick over his hole, almost catching. Sweat sticks between Keith’s back and Shiro’s chest, Shiro’s weight keeping Keith’s shoulders down against the cushion, letting him push harder into the shivering jerk of Shiro’s hips.

He hears it this time when Shiro lets go, even with his teeth caught against the side of Keith’s neck, a low crack like stone breaking as he hunches, hitching forwards, spilling hot over the small of Keith’s back, across his ass. Keith stays with him, Shiro bucking with aftershocks that slide his dick down between Keith’s legs again, up against the tight skin behind his balls.

The sound Keith makes is louder, more mangled when Shiro’s hand reaches under him and starts jerking him off, grip too tight, twisting roughly, and so perfect Keith’s whole body locks up as he comes. He can’t breathe, held right against the sharp edge of it while Shiro’s fingers wring the pulses out of him, other hand pulling Keith back by the hip.

Dropping them both forwards, Shiro kisses the muscle curving up from Keith’s shoulder where Keith fuzzily thinks there’ll be a bite mark. He lets Shiro roll them until they’re on their sides, Shiro’s back flush with the wall, his hand on Keith’s chest. Keith cranes his head for the kiss that barely meets Shiro’s mouth, lips parted sloppily against Shiro’s cheek, his chin, staying pressed against Shiro when he turns away again, tangling their legs, chest tripping on a breath as he closes his eyes.

“It’ll be almost dark by now,” Shiro says eventually, bringing Keith out of a doze.

“Yeah,” he says to the question underneath it, his head folded down with Shiro’s resting against his crown. His arm’s nearly asleep where he’s been lying on it, and Shiro’s hand is still on his sternum. “Yeah, okay.”

They clean up, Shiro staggering off to fetch water and ration bars they can share between them along with some of the food they’ve picked up. They sit half-dressed on the scrubbed-down bunk, backs to the wall as they eat, feet hanging off the edge.

Finishing his second bar, Keith picks Shiro’s hand up off the cushion, lukewarm metal sliding between his fingers, not trying to prove anything, just being sure he doesn’t have to.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Shiro says blandly, looking down at his arm, turning their hands. “It never has, not once. Like it’s always been there.” He huffs, not a laugh. “I’m so afraid I’ll remember them giving it to me. Out of everything that’s still missing, that’s what I—” He shakes his head, gives Keith a misshapen little smile. “What kind of anaesthetic d’you think the Galra use?”

“You’d deal with it,” Keith tells him. What else is there?

“There’s still things you don’t know,” Shiro says.

Keith tightens his hold. “It’s not gonna change anything.”

_I’ll still be here, whoever remembering makes you._

“Sometimes I almost think I miss it,” Shiro says then. He’s not breaking the eye contact, keeping it fixed like he needs it, so Keith doesn’t either.

“Why?”

Shiro shrugs, looking at Keith, past him, just sitting for a while before he says, “Sometimes it’s easier, knowing where the walls are.”

Keith decides it’s probably better if time wears that idea down. He can’t take all of it; it doesn’t belong to him. He squeezes Shiro’s fingers again, leans sideways to kiss him on the top of his shoulder. Then he stands up and starts pulling on his armour, Shiro getting up not long after him.

They’ll just have to keep saving themselves.

-|-

Chilled night air whips up the length of the ramp, whining its way inside as Shiro stands in the hatchway. A storm’s settled in overhead, washing out the stars, rain blowing through the hatch and catching both of them, scattering around their feet. Heavy drops cling to Keith’s face and hands, dripping from his fingertips while he watches Shiro head for his own Lion.

Shiro stops halfway down the ramp, statued with his back to Keith for a second, just his hair being picked over by the gale. He turns and paces back up in a few long strides, pulls Keith in before he can say anything, arms gone tight around Keith’s back.

“We’re gonna find them,” he says over the shushing of the rain, his mouth pressed close to Keith’s ear, warm breath making Keith shiver. “We’re going home, Keith. I promise.”

Keith blinks into the wind, opens his mouth before he realises he can’t speak past the lump in his throat. He nods, his cheek cool against Shiro’s, slipping with rainwater. He returns Shiro’s grip, his arm around Shiro’s middle tight enough to feel through the armour.

He stays standing by the hatch when Shiro turns and treads back down the ramp, the water trailing off him like little undone mooring ropes. He watches Shiro vanish and reappear between the lights of their Lions, nods when Shiro pauses at the bottom of the Black Lion’s rampway and glances back to him. When he disappears inside and Keith shuts the hatch, the instant hush makes his ears ring.

“You ready?” he asks Red, out loud, just to hear something. He gets a nudge between his shoulders that presses harder until his feet start moving.

Back in the cockpit, Keith focuses on the connection, all keenness and tension just barely held back. There’s no grating resistance now, and he doesn’t have to fight to keep hold of it. He lifts off a second after Shiro, overtaking him on the ascent.

They pass through clouds full of lightning like glowing bones, sheets of rain hitting them with new gusts that try to bat them down, staying on an incline, flying up and out from the villages until they leave the thunderheads behind. They cross the terminator into murky daylight just before they punch through the atmosphere. The arc of the planet drops and bends, curves small under them, the sun flaring behind it, and everything all around is stars.

 _Daylight is just starlight that’s taken a detour_. Keith remembers hearing Pidge say that once.

“Got a direction in mind?” he asks, doing a slow turn as Shiro catches up, eye tracing along the bend of a continent.

“ _Forward_ ,” Shiro answers. “ _Until something better comes along_.”

Keith feels Red’s approval like a hum from his own throat.

They go forward.

-|-

The energy surge hits them before they’ve barely reached the next system.

It passes over and around them like a wave, pulling their Lions out of their faster-than-light velocity, dumping them dangerously close to a gas giant. It’s almost like the collapse of the wormhole all over again, except this time the sickness in Keith’s stomach doesn’t fade when he regains control.

“What _is_ that,” he grinds out, talking through his teeth, his Lion’s reaction like a knife in his guts. He pulls clear of the planet’s rings, chunks of ice the size of skyscrapers whizzing past just underneath them as they circle to a stop. All he can get from the instruments is a massive release of power, enough to blank out the sensors. His vision keeps unfocusing when he stares at the displays.

“ _Supernova?_ ” Shiro asks, sounding just as nauseated as Keith. “ _Or maybe it’s the Castle jumping in somewhere close?”_

“It feels _wrong_ ,” Keith answers – it’s all he can come up with to describe the crawling sensation all over his skin. He’s shivering, flashing hot and cold, pressure squeezing his temples like the start of a migraine. “I think it’s our Lions,” he tells Shiro, trying to box up the feedback, lock it into the smallest corner of his skull he can find.

“ _It is_ ,” Shiro says. “ _But_ _whatever’s causing it, it came from the system we were just in.”_

“You want us to go back?” Keith asks. He gets hit instantly with another gut-gripping swell of _loathing_ that sends bile climbing up his throat and makes him slam his eyes shut, breathing ragged through his nose.

Shiro’s voice comes through in fits and starts: “ _Something’s definitely happening back there. I think we need to check it out.”_

Keith swallows, wincing, fighting Red’s flood of pure disgust for whatever they’re picking up. “Easy,” he murmurs thickly under his breath, hand giving the nearest panel an uncoordinated knock. The inside-out feeling dies back a little, but it’s still like standing on a broken leg when he fixes on the star they just left. To Shiro he says, “You know if it’s not the Castle that’s waiting for us...”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Shiro says after a second. “ _Yeah, I know. We can handle it._ ”

“Of course we can,” Keith says, faint, tight smile on his face even with the trembling that’s trying to rattle his teeth. “I’m just pointing out that you’re the one being hasty for a change.”

Shiro’s weak laugh just barely carries over the com, the Black Lion accelerating alongside Keith’s out past two of the gas planet’s larger moons that are locked circling each other, watching like cracked red eyes. “ _Must be the company_.”

“You’re welcome,” Keith says, choking down the stubborn queasiness as they slingshot out into empty space, start closing the gap between them and the source of the reading. It takes more concentration to cope with his Lion’s reaction than it does to fly.

The system looks the same as they dodge through the rocky chunks of failed planets and the cloud of comet fragments strung around its outer edge, the sun slowly growing from a pinhole to a yellow-white circle the size of a penny. All five planets are where they should be, and the single living world they landed on slowly rolls out from behind a dusty brown rock three times its size, finally close enough to see.

The drop in Keith’s stomach stretches into vertigo. His face breaks out in cold sweat that runs down his neck. He doesn’t notice any of it, too busy staring, both Lions drifting to a stop.

“Shiro,” he says, all he can think of, hoarse like his throat’s full of sand.

“ _I see it_ ,” Shiro says in the same thready voice, like he’s scared of being overheard. “ _What—what have they_ done?”

Keith just numbly shakes his head, magnifying the images in front of him. He’s trying to find their field, the jungles, the clumps of the villages with hundreds of claylike huts built up along the widest points of branching rivers.

The planet’s sunken face stares back at him, blank and dull as a floating corpse, greying and surrounded by flies. The purple-black flecks of Galra ships cover up random stars as they buzz between the planet and the hulking command ship that’s sitting in low orbit, pressing down like a jackboot.

“They killed it,” he says finally, because it should be said, recognised. It burns, worms through Red and back to him again, anger spiralling around horror. “They killed the entire planet. There’s nothing left down there.”

Tingling pain runs down his arms into his fingers, down his legs and spine. There’s an acrid taste in his mouth like breathing smoke, but Keith feels numb, like he’s fallen through ice into a frozen lake, everything shutting down and constricting, just the rage left.

“ _Why_?” Shiro asks, helpless, like he just needs to ask _something_. “ _Why would they even_ do _this?_ ”

“Does it matter?” Keith says, granite-voiced, not blinking as the planet rotates awfully, like something strung up still swinging, sunlight showing one drained, lifeless patch of land after another, the colour of soot and tar and rot.

On enhanced displays, they look down at thousands of trees fallen into each other, piled up like skeletons, scars of dried riverbeds, deserts where there should be marshland. Clouds of dust and unfixed topsoil miles wide run relentlessly around the world’s curve, churning the air into a brown haze, cracked with electrical discharge. Nothing moves that’s still alive.

The _hate_ Keith feels starts to outrun what he’s getting from his Lion, sends him slumping forwards, hands balling up so hard his knuckles crack. “We need to do something,” he says, not sure if he’s talking to himself or Shiro or Red. “They can’t get away with this.”

“ _Keith, wait_ ,” Shiro says. “ _I’m angry too, okay? But take a look at the size of that fleet._ ”

Keith nods. “There’s a lot of them.” He tenses and untenses his jaw, swallowing. “So we won’t miss.”

“ _That’s a command ship_ , _Keith_ ,” Shiro presses. “ _For all we know, Zarkon could be on it_.”

“Wow,” Keith says on a choppy breath that’s loud in his ears, hollow-chested as he pushes back in the seat. “I really fucking hope so.”

“ _Even if we can deal with the fleet, we’d need Voltron to take down a ship like that_.” There’s desperation sharpening Shiro’s voice now.

Keith leans his weight into the controls. “Voltron’s not here. We are.”

“ _Keith_ —”

“All those people, Shiro,” he grits out. “The whole _planet_.”

People who probably never knew they were about to die when the shadow of that ship rolled over them. Leaves bigger than Keith turning slowly in the sun. The chiming sound of the stream, water flowing clear as glass. Wings fracturing light into colour across Shiro’s face. A night-time field bursting with green stars. A world of things that hadn’t even happened yet. Stolen. Bled out. For what?

Keith doesn’t care.

His Lion’s screaming towards the fleet almost before he even tells it to. He knows Shiro says something, but it gets run over by the blood in Keith’s ears.

“They’re not doing this to anyone else,” he says. The Galra ships are turning now, adjusting formation. Keith can see dozens, hundreds of fighters blooming out of hangars like pollen. He aims right for the centre, driving his Lion in a straight line like the point of a sword.

“ _Keith_ ,” Shiro says again, loud and frayed. “ _They’ll kill you_.”

“No they won’t,” Keith tells him, lips pulling back from his teeth. “You won’t let them.”

He smashes into the fleet, two and then three ships going up, disappearing in fire and expanding shock fronts, waves of fighters scattering in all directions. His Lion collides with the body of a battleship, metal shrieking as it bends and splits under Red’s claws, forcing their way through with a blast that decapitates the ship and hurls them back out into space as the two drifting halves explode.

Cannon shots streak close, seven or eight ships trying to surround him, spears of energy lighting up empty space. A glancing hit throws Keith sideways, and he grunts as he flies sharply down, under one ship, letting it absorb the shot from another one before he turns and fires. His head snaps back when a pair of fighters suddenly jackknife and ram into his Lion, the impact jarring his bones, another swarm already chasing him down by the time he reorients and accelerates again.

Keith flies low over the hull of another capital ship, close enough to touch, looping around and around as its turrets swivel to track him, beams glancing harmlessly into the place where Keith was a split-second before. Some of the shots take out the fighters chasing him, shred them two or three at a time, throw them off into space or send them crashing down into the ship, leaving razor shreds of wingtips and flaming gouges.

Rotating as he fires, Keith saws through two ships near their engines, gaps in their hulls lit with detonations, decompressions, trailing streamers of plasma. As he watches, the ships tumble into the planet’s gravity, glowing an ugly orange as they hit the atmosphere, finally getting swallowed by one of the country-sized dust storms on their way to being shattered against the surface. Throwing bodies in an open grave.

He realises he’s grinning by the ache in his cheeks, every muscle in his body humming under his skin. Distantly, he wonders where in the fight Shiro is, but he can’t slow down to look. It’s been seconds, maybe minutes since the battle started, but it doesn’t matter. There’s only _now_ , replaced over and over as Keith’s heart clatters and ship after crumbling ship transforms into a miniature star, burning like funeral pyres, sketching long unnatural shadows across the silent landmasses down below them.

Through the debris, past firework-flashes that leave coloured imprints behind Keith’s eyes when he blinks, he can make out a group of midsize cruisers forming into a screen between him and the command ship, their guns turning on him.

 _They can’t stop us,_ he thinks, his Lion’s power like a part of him, dagger-sharp in his hands and roaring at his back. He kicks them forwards, faster, into a tightening spiral aimed right at the heart of the formation.

Fighters arrow in his direction like flocks of saw-toothed birds as the cruisers open up on him. Keith weaves between the volleys, luring fighters into some of them, others hitting his Lion like clubs and knocking the air out of him.

He veers between the ships, gets cut off by four more and darts away, not trying to think, trusting his hands to know where to turn. The command ship’s moving now, lumbering out of orbit, and Keith clenches his jaw, tries again to break the blockade.

There’s another two ships for every one he manages to fight his way past, more joining the tangled firefight every time Keith crashes one prong-hulled cruiser into the side of the next. The space between them is thick with fighters jockeying for the best position to shoot Keith down or fly straight into him, dozens sweeping down through the pieces of the hundred that came before them.

“Come on,” he hisses, looking for a gap, any gap he can punch through. The command ship turns slowly against the white glint of the sun, giving off its own violet phosphor glow. Getting ready to jump away. “Come _on_ ,” he says again, driving forward, yelling when another ship crosses downwards and forces him to the side.

More hits catch him that he can’t evade, the Galra carelessly firing into the paths of their own ships now, trying to get at Keith. Fighters chain-react into each other, bigger ships sacrificing themselves just to wall Keith off, holding position even while they’re being pummelled by their own fleet.

Keith’s caged in, too occupied with dodging more energy blasts to force his way out, while the narrow stretches of black-and-stars he can see get smaller and smaller. There’s something close to panic clawing in his stomach.

A blinding blue light passes over two of the ships and breaks them apart, smashing the pieces outwards like a tidal wave. It washes away more than half the fighters chasing Keith down, the explosions afterwards seeming dimmer, less real after that first flare. Keith turns his face away, squinting while the column of energy hammers down into the clustered cruisers, some of them so totally caught by it that they’re just _gone_ when Keith looks again.

The Black Lion meteors through the fleet, nothing left behind it except tiny fragments of slowly cooling, melted metal, icy ribbons of frozen air and fuel that break apart and glitter when light catches them.

“Took your time,” Keith says, wincing at the strained muscles in his shoulders, the ache in his limbs.

“ _I was a little busy with the rest of them_ ,” Shiro tells him. “ _Next time maybe you’ll wait for backup_.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Keith snorts, searching above the planet’s arc for the command ship. It’s further out now, near the moon’s orbit, lines of violet pulsing across its surface. Already moving, Keith asks, “You coming with me this time?”

“ _You’re going anyway_ ,” Shiro points out.

“Yeah,” Keith says easily. “But it’s better with you.”

He can just about hear Shiro’s breathing. _“I guess I can’t let you have all the fun_.”

Keith’s grin digs deeper into the sides of his mouth. “Then try to keep up,” he says, remembering the last time, however many borders ago.

The command ship is just beyond the moon when they reach it. It’s still moving, just not fast enough.

“ _Okay_ ,” Shiro says, “ _I’ll try and draw its fire while you get in close. Look for a vulnerable system – a reactor, an unshielded hangar, anything that’ll create secondary explosions_.”

“Got it,” Keith says, the massive bulk of the ship looming like a whole other moon, spiked and thickly-armoured as a scorpion. He peels away from the Black Lion, flying close to the moon’s surface, craters and untouched spans of airless dust blurring by.

He doesn’t spot the second fleet until after they’re already heading to intercept him.

There are dozens more ships, most of them battleships, with hundreds of fighters, all clinging close to the moon’s dark side. All bearing down on him. Keith swears under his breath, wrenching upward and aiming for clear space, the Galra already trying to cut him off from above, to make him fight with his back to dead rock and hampering gravity.

“Shiro,” he says, quick and sharp, shooting down the first group of fighters that come in range, “it’s a trap.”

“ _I noticed_ ,” Shiro answers, and Keith doesn’t know where he is, but he can hear the strain in Shiro’s voice.

Then the command ship starts firing.

It hits the moon like a hot poker being dragged over a block of ice, with a flash that hides the sun and a bone-deep resonance that Keith feels in his teeth, all through the joints of his hands. The searing glow of the beams leave afterimages in the corners of his eyes, scoring wide canyons into the moon’s surface that disappear down through the crust, maybe all the way to the frozen core.

Curtains of dust and huge molten boulders get launched off into space, and Keith has to swerve up and around a glowing red lump of raw iron the size of a small mountain. More blasts from the fleet try to centre on him, and the command ship keeps raining fire on them like a hail of arrows.

Using some of the rock fragments for cover, Keith avoids a shot from a battleship’s main cannon, streaking clear of the moon with half a mile of grey dust trailing behind him. He hacks up through another cruiser and its fighter escort, eyes mostly on the sensors, looking for the Black Lion.

He finally tracks Shiro up near the command ship, busy raking every weapons bank he can find, scrawling lines of fire across the armour plating. He’s got three ships closing on his back, and Keith charges past him, strafing two of the ships, landing quickly on the hull of the third and breaking through the thin neck behind the prow, severing it.

“Having fun yet?” he asks Shiro through the vice of his jaw.

The next shot from the command ship swings down on them like a burning sword, cutting another Galra ship neatly in half and carving a gash from the edge of the moon inwards, the beam visibly passing out the other side for a second. It hits the ship Keith’s still pushing away from, slicing nearer. He’s aware of the explosion an instant before the blast makes contact.

He gets thrown forward, his chest crushed, the cockpit going dark or his vision greying out. Like watching a puppet, Keith sees his arms jerk away from the controls, and something _pulls_ in his shoulder with a rush of pain that turns his stomach. His ears are ringing, everything else sounding muted, the alarms barely reaching him. He vaguely recognises the clumsy feeling of zero-g, and when he tries to right himself in the seat his body doesn’t listen. From under his helmet, something warm trickles down the side of his face.

Spinning in space, Red’s internal gravity gone, displays sputtering all around the cockpit, Keith catches snapshots of the stars turning, the dead planet, the Galra ships getting closer. He tries to speak, but his tongue’s thick and there’s blood in his throat, and he chokes when he goes to breathe. Another turn, and through the smoke in the cockpit or the fog in his head, Keith sees the moon, cleaved down to the core like an apple, starting to be torn in half by its own rotation.

In a detached way he knows should scare him, Keith thinks he might be dying. He thinks he hears Shiro’s voice calling him. But then he would, wouldn’t he? He slurs out something that might be an apology, with no real destination to it. Just sorry that it’s over.

A shadow unfolds across everything. Keith cranes his neck, bleary-eyed, expecting to see the command ship, more Galra. But it’s white, lined with glowing blue, and Keith stares up, blinking at a wide field of patterned metal parting into the day-bright mouth of a hangar.

 _Not a bad last dream_ , he thinks as he passes out.

-|-

Everything’s still white when he wakes up.

His lids are heavy, but Keith drags them up and lets them fall, clearing his eyes until he’s looking at a metal ceiling. It hurts to turn his head, and he can’t move the rest of himself at all, but he gets a watery view of walls, soft pale lights, and the machine hooked into his arm. There’s a sheet pulled up to his chest, a loose white shirt showing under that; Keith registers his missing armour with a kind of hazy peace.

Rolling his neck the other way, Keith sees Shiro, sitting in a chair by the bed, his elbow on its arm and his face dropped against his fist, whole body slouched over. Shiro’s eyes are closed, the dark bruises under them getting smudged like charcoal by his lashes. He’s in his regular clothes, and it’s different enough that it changes the whole shape of him. There’s a thin but still angry-looking cut high up near his hairline, scabbed over. Keith feels less peaceful about that, but he can’t get enough strength together to manage talking.

Like there’s a lead weight draped across him, Keith sinks back under, holding his eyes open as long as he can, groggily trying to count Shiro’s breaths.

His head’s clearer the next time he surfaces, less full of cotton, the sluggish, heavy feeling being pushed aside by muscle cramps and the scratching in his throat.

“What,” he starts, and ends up curled into himself, coughing until his ribs ache and his eyes start to run. His throat feels like a tinderbox, his chest painfully tight. Coloured spots dance around the edges of the room when he blinks.

Shiro appears over him, rolling Keith flat with a hand on his shoulder. His face is a map of worry lines, his lips pinched until they’re almost white.

“You’re okay,” he says, still looking seriously spooked, his face drained and pale, almost matching the hair hanging limply in his eyes. His hands go from Keith’s shoulders to his upper arms, pause on his chest and flutter away again. “It’s okay, Keith. Just take it easy.”

You _take it easy_ , Keith tries to say, but it sticks in his throat, just a thin wheeze getting past his lips, his tongue dry and clinging to the roof of his mouth. He glares instead, hard as he can. Shiro looks weirdly relieved, whole upper body dropping on a loud exhale. His eyes are so intense it’s almost scary.

Keith works on breathing without spluttering, stops breathing completely for a second when Shiro’s hand touches his face, lightly brushing away the wet streaks from the coughing fit, eyes fixed on Keith’s cheek. Leaning back, he turns and steps out of sight, then comes back with a cup in his hand.

“Water,” he says, and Keith manages to nod even though it makes him dizzy.

He lets Shiro help him up, the head of the bed curving upwards a little like it’s getting ready to catch him. It’s an involved process to lift his arm, get his fingers around the cup and take it from Shiro, and water spills over when he tilts it too far, scowling at the way his hand shakes.

“It’s all right,” Shiro says, his hand wrapping around Keith’s on the cup while Keith drinks, staying there until the cup’s empty and Keith can drop back to the bed again. He’s breathing too hard, the muscles in his neck aching and strained. His hand curls in the sheet against his chest, grip still weak, skin still warm from Shiro’s fingers.

“We’re back,” he croaks, looking around at the familiar colours, the lights, the shape of the Castle’s walls.

“We’re back,” Shiro nods. He’s trying to smile, but it keeps slipping off his mouth like rain down a window.

“The Galra?”

“We got a lot of them,” Shiro tells him. “The command ship jumped out when the Castle showed up.”

“So we lost,” Keith says, swallowing, his throat still coated in sandpaper.

“Yeah,” Shiro sighs, looking away, “we did.” He drops back into his chair. “But we’re alive. The others will want to know you’re awake.”

“They’re okay?”

Shiro nods again, the smile a little more real this time. “Yeah, they are. Everyone got scattered after the fight with Zarkon, but they kept looking until they found each other. We were actually the last ones left on our own.”

“We weren’t on our own,” Keith reminds him. He flicks his eyes around at the room. “How’d they find us?”

“By accident, mostly,” Shiro shrugs. “They were searching for us, and they ended up following the same reading we were. The battle helped,” he huffs. “Apparently we made some noise.”

Keith’s hands clench up, pulling the sheet unevenly. “The Galra lured us there. They knew we were close, so they killed the planet to get to us.”

“Maybe,” Shiro says. He lets out another sigh when Keith just stares. “Probably. But Coran says they didn’t just kill it; they were draining it for power, fuel, whatever. They’ve done it to other planets already. We couldn’t have stopped them, Keith, not that time. We would’ve died trying.”

“It might’ve been worth it,” Keith says.

Shiro shakes his head. “Dying’s never worth it. Only living. Dying is just dying.”

He fills Keith in on what Coran and Allura and the others have told him, talking about quintessence and the Galra’s rushing expansion, how they’d started trying to track Shiro and him by following the Galra that were after them. Keith zones out for some of it, flashing back on the dead planet, its dissected moon, or just watching Shiro’s hands move while he speaks, trying to get used to Shiro in normal clothes again.

“Everyone’s been in here, on and off,” Shiro tells him, “but it’s the middle of the night right now, and we were all—I told them to go get some sleep.” He’s still not quite looking Keith in the eye.

“Not you?” Keith asks, not sure if he’s fond or irritated, or just relieved Shiro’s still here.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Shiro says. “Tried training, but I couldn’t focus. I tried walking around the Castle, but I just kept ending up back here. Besides, I didn’t want you to wake up on your own.”

“How long?” Keith asks, watching Shiro’s face, the way it goes stiff around the edges, muscles twitching in his jaw. He looks like he’s bleeding somewhere.

“It’s been five days,” Shiro says, hands gone tight in his lap. Keith wants to doubt it, but there’s no way to do that with Shiro bent in on himself, with the sharp, stranded twist to his mouth and the brittle way he’s moving. “Coran had you in a pod for three, and then we moved you in here. You haven’t been conscious for more than a few minutes since then.” He folds over a little more at the waist, face hidden, sighing before he straightens up, smiling weakly at Keith. “You kinda had me worried.”

“Sorry,” Keith says lamely. “Five days?” He tries to find anything from the missing time, but it’s all a blank, broken here and there by woozy, stabbing lights and a slow sinking feeling. “That bad?”

Shiro just winces, digs a hand through his hair. His mouth opens, closes again. Keith slowly moves his arm out, and Shiro catches his hand in midair, squeezing tight enough to feel it in the bones before he sets Keith’s hand back on the bed, leaves his own on top of it. Keith can practically see the vein of guilt that runs all through him glowing like it’s radioactive.

“Hey,” he says. “It was my idea. Stop being selfish and let me feel shitty about it, okay?” He smiles lopsided when Shiro chokes on a laugh, shaking his head.

Keith decides to try sitting up again, frowning at the pull on his left arm. He looks over at the tall, thin machine by the bed, two clear tubes running from it to a silvery patch in the crook of his elbow. He slips his hand out from underneath Shiro’s, starts peeling the patch away, the material somewhere between fabric and foil.

“Keith,” Shiro says, standing up. “I don’t think you should really be doing that right now.”

“Then you do it,” Keith sighs, dropping back against the mattress. He meets Shiro’s stubborn, flat look. “If you don’t, I’ll probably fall off the bed doing it myself. Might crack my head open, break an arm.”

“I can’t believe I missed you,” Shiro mutters, walking around the bed. Keith aims his drowsy grin at the ceiling.

The tubes come out painlessly, the flow of whatever’s in them cutting off when Shiro lets them drop, and they wind up smoothly into the body of the machine. Keith sits up gingerly, a little easier this time, until his bare feet are on the floor and he’s got his palms hooked on the side of the bed. The pants he’s wearing are exactly as bland and white as the shirt, the light fabric smooth and cool when he touches it.

Shiro hovers in front of him, looking doubtful and hopeful at the same time.

“I’m not gonna fall,” Keith tells him, stretching his neck, working some of the stiffness out of his shoulders. “So you can stop looking at me looking that. I can still kick your ass.”

Shiro snorts. “Just focus on standing up for now, okay? Go slow.” Keith gives him another look for that, and Shiro rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he sighs, making a _go ahead_ gesture.

Blood tingling through his legs, Keith slowly rolls his weight into his feet, bracing his knees. His head rushes a little when he stands, and he takes a slow breath until things look less blurry. He walks forward one step, two, then his body decides to buckle, legs going out from under him.

Shiro catches him around the waist before he hits the floor, holding him up.

“I had it,” Keith says, arm flung around Shiro’s back.

“I know,” Shiro says, breath ruffling Keith’s hair.

“But you just wanted to,” Keith says, looking up, and Shiro huffs, leans his forehead against Keith’s. “It really was that bad, huh?”

“Bad enough,” Shiro says thinly, splintered around the sound of him swallowing. His arms grip and release around Keith over and over, like he’s scared Keith’s going to crack.

Keith slides his hand up between Shiro’s shoulders to the nape of his neck, tilting Shiro down into a dry, awkward kiss, all chapped lips and clacking teeth. If he’s waiting for Shiro to pull away from him, he manages not to show it. Shiro’s hands stay on his sides, kissing Keith’s bottom lip before he does step back, and he stays glued to Keith’s shoulder while Keith walks around the room, the strength slowly coming back to his limbs, the shakes fading.

“Where’s my suit?” Keith asks, more out of breath than he’s trying to let on, plucking at the thin white shirt when sweat makes it cling to his chest.

“It’s getting fixed,” Shiro says. He walks back to his chair and picks up a pile of clothes from down by its side. “I brought these from your room.” Seeing the next question coming, he adds: “Our Lions are okay. Yours took a beating, but I think I patched up most of it. Good thing I’ve had some practice. You should’ve seen the look on Pidge’s face.”

Keith’s eyebrow ticks up. “You fixed it by yourself?”

Shiro lifts a shoulder. “I had some time on my hands,” he says, coming short of casual. “Anyway, I didn’t have much choice. Your Lion wouldn’t let anyone else in, wouldn’t even drop the particle barrier until I went to the hangar by myself.”

“I guess it trusts you,” Keith says, crossing to the side of the bed, picking at the clothes. He pulls the white shirt off by the collar, his left shoulder only aching a little. Looking down at himself, Keith sees a wide bruise that’s wrapped around his side, but it looks weeks old, faded yellow, barely twinging when he presses on it.

“You broke some ribs,” Shiro puts in, voice even, matter-of-fact. “And you tore that shoulder up pretty good.”

“Anything else?” Keith asks, glancing up, his black tee unfolding against his fingers.

“Skull fracture,” Shiro says, the expression scoured off his face until it’s like looking at a blank wall, but it’s a thin one, with a lot of movement just behind it. “It was a pretty long list.”

“Okay,” Keith says after a second. “So that joke about cracking my head open?”

“Yeah. Not so funny.”

Keith nods with a wince. “Lucky I’m still here then, I guess.”

“Right,” Shiro says, heavy even though it’s quiet and all air. Shirt still dangling from one hand, Keith reaches over and catches Shiro’s wrist, keeps hold of it while he looks Shiro in the eye, his fingers tight enough to feel Shiro’s pulse.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and Shiro nods, swallowing.

“Me too,” Shiro tells him.

“For what?” Keith asks. “Not taking that hit for me? I never would’ve let you.”

Shiro shakes his head, eyes dropping. He turns his hand until his palm presses against Keith’s. “Then I’m just sorry,” he says quietly.

Keith swallows back the sharp answer he wants to give. He’s too tired to fight about whatever blame complex Shiro’s got his head wrapped up in right now. He’s too glad to be back for the fight to even feel worth the effort.

He squeezes Shiro’s hand again and goes back to getting dressed, kicking out of the pants, slowly tugging the shirt over his head. He runs a hand over his jacket where it’s spread out on the bed, then starts dragging it on, gritting his teeth against the tight pull in his shoulder.

“Here,” Shiro says, coming around the bed and standing behind him. He untangles the jacket from the middle of Keith’s back, holding it out while Keith works his arm into it. His hands smooth out the sleeves, tugging it into place while a shiver climbs along Keith’s skin in the opposite direction, overflowing down his spine.

They stay standing like that for a minute, Shiro with his hands on Keith’s arms, Keith with his back just barely separated from Shiro’s chest, leaning like trees, all practiced distance, memorised closeness.

Keith doesn’t mean to close his eyes, they just stay that way when he blinks, his body swaying back a little. “We’re home,” he says quietly, barely out loud.

Shiro’s thumb rubs across the ball of his shoulder, brushes against his neck. “We’re home.”

“Do you think we earned it?”

Shiro’s silent for a second before he says, “I hope so.” He closes the gap, keeping Keith up. “If we didn’t, we’ll figure it out.”

“We have to,” Keith breathes, letting more of his weight fall against Shiro. “Or they win.”

-|-

The corridors are quiet except for the hum of power through the Castle and the sounds their feet make, Shiro keeping to Keith’s pace, stopping when Keith does without saying anything. Walking gets easier the further they go, and Keith lets out a breath when the hangar doors open and he sees their Lions standing side by side.

“You know this can wait,” Shiro says. “It’s not going anywhere. The others—”

“I’ll see them in the morning,” Keith says, still looking at the fresh scoring on the outside of his Lion that’ll need to be repaired.

“What d’you want to tell them?” Shiro asks, the careful, lightly-treading tone explaining more than the question.

Keith glances at Shiro, shrugs. He can’t see the wires, the hanging maybes. “If they’re smart, they’ll figure it out.”

“They might have already,” Shiro admits, and Keith snorts.

“Because you feel obsessively responsible for me?” He bumps Shiro’s shoulder with his, the side of his hand nudging Shiro’s where they hang down between them. “If that was all it took they’d have to look twice at the whole galaxy.”

“C’mon,” Shiro says, but his mouth twitches, and he returns the bump as they cross the hangar, fingers crossing with Keith’s on a swing of his arm.

What Keith picks up from Red is mostly quiet, ticking over, but it gets louder as he pulls off his gloves and puts his hand on the side of a paw, a reluctant jolt answering him inside his head.

“Yeah, yeah,” he mutters, but he’s smiling. “I know. But we both screwed up. You were right there with me. Can’t blame me for all of it.”

“It got you out of there,” Shiro says, standing over his shoulder. “Flew you right into the hangar while I was still trying to fight my way clear of the Galra. Took out another ship on the way in, too.”

Keith gives the metal a pat, the ramp lowering. He turns back to Shiro where he’s still standing like he’s waiting to catch Keith mid-pratfall again.

“I’m fine,” Keith tells him.

“Now,” Shiro says, crossing his arms.

Keith sighs. “Is this where you make me promise to stay out of trouble?” He’d almost forgotten the first time Shiro did that, the two of them in the hall outside the Garrison gym where Shiro’d ambushed him. The yelling match went on and on, until Shiro was in his space and Keith was slouching on purpose just to rile him up even more, carefree smirk on his face and three new demerits in his file.

 _You’re just pissed ‘cause I smashed your record_.

Shiro’s glare could have boiled a lake. _There’s no reward for dying first and fastest, Keith._

_There’s no skill to playing it safe, either._

Shiro called him down to the simulator at five the next morning, taught him more about real flying in an hour than he’d learned in a month, actually listening when Keith disagreed with him. They met up like that almost every morning afterwards, Shiro pulling strings to get them the sim time, eating breakfast after at a table they’d staked out in the mess, pads with diagrams and specs scattered around them, drawing approach angles in spilled handfuls of salt.

Now, looking around, Keith can’t believe he’d ever thought he understood anything, but when he looks at Shiro he’s not sure he was wrong either.

This time Shiro just huffs. “I know who I’m talking to,” he says, rolling his eyes when Keith grins, following him up the ramp.

Sitting in the pilot’s seat, Keith checks everything in the cockpit, running scans and tweaking the things that aren’t quite right, things only he’d notice or that Red guides him to. Shiro leans in the hatchway, his attention making the back of Keith’s neck itch.

“Do I get a passing grade?” he asks when Keith turns around.

“Not bad,” Keith says, waggling a hand from side to side. He stands up, leaning on the back of the chair when his ribs throb, sighing when Shiro instantly pushes off the wall and comes over to him. “Seriously,” he says.

“I know,” Shiro nods. “You’re fine. But you weren’t not too long ago. We’re safe, Keith. You’d really rather hole up in here instead of getting some decent  rest?”

Keith gives Shiro a long, thorough look from under his lashes, tilting his head. “It’s a thought.”

Shiro huffs, standing close enough now for their feet to slide together, eyes falling to Keith’s mouth. His arm comes up slowly, testing, and Keith stays right where he is, until Shiro’s hand is in his hair, sliding around to the nape of his neck. There’s no pain in his head, no bandages or dried blood. The only clue there was ever a wound is the look on Shiro’s face.

“I won’t make you promise,” Shiro tells him.

Keith nods, the motion of it tipping into Shiro’s palm. His hands anchor onto Shiro’s sides. “I’ll try, okay? Best I can do.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Shiro says, light and not light at all, like being buried in a snowdrift. You’d think that kind of softness would live somewhere less open, better protected. Maybe then it wouldn’t count.

Shiro’s fingers work over the corded tendons and taut muscles at the sides of Keith’s neck, until Keith’s chin drops near his chest, propped up between Shiro and his Lion, two sorts of warmth, different versions of the same kind of danger - being known, or just admitting to wanting it.

“You’re real, right?” he asks, voice worn thin and tired, eyes closed. He’s half joking, half something else. “It’s not a trick? I’m not still asleep, back in that room?”

Shiro tips Keith’s head up with fingers under his jaw. With Keith’s vision still struggling, the offset light turns Shiro to silver and stone, concrete and elemental, still soft around his eyes, in his hands, like whoever carved him knew where to pay attention.

“You think you could make me up?” Shiro asks, small tilt touching his mouth, curling like paper, an old book that’s been thumbed through over and over.

 _I’d have to_ , Keith thinks.

“What, like you’re so complicated?” he says, and Shiro laughs, a real laugh this time.

The shape of the laugh is still there when his lips fit softly between Keith’s, opening him carefully, patient as in _worthwhile_ and not _full-of-tripwires_ , the sound it makes still wind-chiming in Keith’s ears when Shiro turns his head to change the angle, and Keith’s chest feels full, unfurling like a sail.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! I can also be found writing more things [here](queerly-it-is.tumblr.com) on tumblr :D


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